Some people think that cooking brown rice is hard. I have for years.
I've tried it several different ways. One of the ways that I've cooked brown rice
is in a rice cooker and I've ended up often
with kinda of a wet mush and extra water would run around on the
plate. It tasted okay but the texture
was just terrible, so then I thought well
maybe I could do it in a saucepan on top of the stove.
So I did it that way but more often than not
I ended up with kind of a brown crust
on the bottom of the pan and I ended up with
rice that didn't taste all that
good, it kind of stuck together
I ended up with the saucepan that took forever to clean.
Now, I'm going to show you
an easier way to cook brown rice that I just learned
from a friend recently. One of the confusing things about cooking brown rice
is trying to figure out the right ratio
of water to rice. For one cup of
rice some people say you should just use one cup water.
Others have said a cup and a half, some people even say two cups.
And then it also matters what altitude your at.
If you're high in the mountains it may take two or three cups
for every cup of rice. Well the cooking method here
doesn't matter are how much water you use,
there are no ratios to worry about so it's simple.
It's also a great way to cook
other whole grains like Quinoa. Quinoa
is a grain. It's two thousand years old from high up in the Andes.
It's high in protein and all you have to do is put in boiling water
until its tender, fifteen or twenty minutes, strain it out
and you've got great whole grain dish.
For the brown rice, we're going to take the first step
and just put this cup brown rice
into some boiling water. That's all there is to it.
Now we wait for twenty or twenty two minutes.
It's time to drain the rice.
We'll just put the rice
right over here into a colander.
And then we're going to take the rice and just put it back over here
right into a cast iron skillet. Cover this up
with some aluminum foil, reasonably tightly
and now all we do put this in the oven
350 degrees
your oven has been preheating the whole time and set it
for ten minutes. And pretty soon we're going to have great
brown rice. Ah!
Perfect! You know rice is great
as a side dish. I also like to use it as a one-dish meal.
So let's just take this rice.
Look at that. It just comes out of the pan. It's perfectly
done. It doesn't stick. Excellent.
So we've got this warm rice and we can take the big handfuls now
of spinach or arugula. Just toss that into the warm rice.
We'll stir this up just a little bit.
it's also good to add
some sliced cherry tomatoes in season.
If the cherry tomatoes aren't in season,
nice and red and luscious and tasty, you can always use
sun-dried tomatoes. I've got some leftover
roasted chicken breast from just a couple nights ago
as a little protein, a little more protein to the dish.
And then all we need, is a simple
lemon vinegarette. Oh this looks good.
There you go. Here's a one-dish meal
for four people.
Perfect. If I can do this,
you can too.
For today's recipe and more like it,
visit my blog and get cooking.