I’ve been cooking rice all wrong my entire life.
Or to be more precise, I had no trouble with 1 and half cups of rice, it’s 3 and 4 cups
that would always turn out mushy.
I used to attribute it to my instant pot.
I thought maybe it can’t handle a larger quantity.
But then something occurred to me while I was reading Crying in H-Mart.
When Michelle Zauner asked her Mom how to cook rice, her Mom said something like “cover
rice with water by a knuckle or finger” and Michelle said, “but how many cups is
that?”
and her Mom said, “oh come on, you know I don’t do cups”.
I heard this knuckle or finger theory from many Asian cooks and there is really something
to it.
I can see some of my viewers jumping out of their seats.
Finally, the overly precise and science minded Helen is embracing traditional home cooking
methods where flour is measured by the handfuls and water is measured by the knuckles.
Well, hold your horses!
Don’t throw away your scale just yet.
But… this intuitive way of cooking rice gave me an idea.
I started paying attention to how deep the water looked for different amounts of rice.
My usual ratio is 1 cup of washed rice to 1 cup of water.
When I used this ratio for 1 cup of rice, the water covered rice by this much.
But when I used this ratio for 4 cups of rice, the water covered rice by this much.
Well, take my finger measurements with a grain of salt.
But what I am trying to say is that for small quantities of rice, I had just a little water
above the rice, and for large quantities of rice I had a lot of water above the rice.
And that makes sense because the diameter of the pot hasn’t changed.
If our pot would grow with our rice and water, scaling rice would be easy peasy.
But that’s not practical.
Most of us have only 1 rice cooker or instant pot.
And even if you are cooking in a regular pot, you probably aren’t changing pots to go
from 2 cups to 3 cups of rice.
So I started cutting down water for big batches to see if my rice would improve and it did.
The problem was that it took a lot of guesswork.
Every time I was faced with a new amount of rice, I never knew exactly how much water
I needed.
There was only one way to find out -- cook a scary amount of rice and take notes.
The goal of my experiment was to figure out the correct amount of water to use for anywhere
from 1 and a half to 4 cups of rice.
The rice types that I usually cook are sushi rice and jasmine rice.
The sushi rice that I use is outrageously expensive, so I did my testing on jasmine
rice since its ratio of rice to water is the same.
At least it’s the same when using small quantities like 1 and half cups.
For the first batch, I cooked the amount that has always worked well for me -- 1 and half
cups.
This serves about 3 to 4 people.
So first I rinsed the rice to remove excess starch.
To make sure I removed all the water, I dumped it through a fine mesh strainer and waited
for it to stop dripping.
I used to carefully pour the water out of the pot trying not to dump the rice into the
sink, but the strainer method is way faster even if you take rinsing the strainer into
account.
It’s also way more accurate.
If you leave some of the water in the rice, your rice to water ratio could change from
batch to batch.
Not an issue if you are measuring the depth of water and not the volume of water.
But I am measuring the volume, so I have to be accurate.
I added 1 and half cups of water and tried to measure the water depth, but that turned
out to be tricky.
Using my hand didn’t feel very productive to me since people have different hand sizes.
I tried to use a ruler, but that was very misleading too.
First of all it wouldn’t sit on top of the rice, it would sink.
And the rice wasn’t in a perfectly even layer either.
But I did try to get a gut feel for what the water depth looked like and that came in handy
later on.
I sealed up my instant pot and set it to the “Rice” setting.
That’s 12 minutes on low pressure.
I let the pressure drop naturally.
Then I opened the pot, added 1 and half tablespoons of butter and fluffed up the rice.
As you can see -- nothing stuck to the pot.
The rice came out perfect.
Not crunchy, not mushy -- just right.
I repeated the same experiment with 3 cups of rice.
I knew that 3 cups of water would be too much, so I tried 2 and two thirds.
But then I looked at it and it seemed way deeper to me than the first batch, so I strained
the rice again and tried 2 and half cups of water.
It still looked a bit deeper than 1 and a half cups, but I was afraid to go any lower.
Well, lucky for me, I guessed correctly.
This rice turned out absolutely perfect!
Nothing stuck to the bottom of the pot and the texture was great.
Encouraged by my success with aggressive water reduction for the 3 cup batch, I decided to
go with only 3 cups of water for 4 cups of rice.
Nothing stuck to the bottom of the pot, but the texture was a teeny tiny bit too firm.
Almost perfect!
In a recent class, I needed 4 cups of sushi rice, and armed with this experiment I tried
3 cups of water plus 2 Tablespoons and this time, the rice turned out perfectly.
So now I know how much water 4 cups of rice need.
Here are the ratios that work well for me for any rinsed and thoroughly drained white
rice cooked in a 6 quart instant pot.
You can try these measurements with your equipment and make any necessary adjustments.
How much water you’ll need will depend on the exact diameter of your pot, whether it’s
sealed with a gasket or just covered with a lid, the exact type of white rice you are
cooking, and of course your personal preference.
What I want you to take away from this experiment is not the exact measurements, but the idea
that the more rice you cook, the less water you need per cup of rice.
At least assuming that your pot doesn’t change.
You might be wondering why I didn’t include a measurement for 1 cup of rice.
I find that 1 cup is such a small amount that my 6 quart instant pot doesn’t cook it well.
It’s also so tiny that I never have a need for 1 cup of rice.
But if you do need 1 cup, I would try to use the smallest diameter pot that you have, and
use a 1:1 rice to water ratio.
I bet the same applies to other grains as well, like buckwheat and quinoa, but I haven’t
tested it yet.
Another thing I would encourage you to do is to pay close attention to what the water
level looks like for the quantities you normally cook.
This way, just in case you one day need 6 cups of rice, you can use your intuition for
how much water you need.
Personally, I would make an educated guess, measure it out, and write it down, so that
next time I can adjust as necessary.
Here are more thought provoking culinary videos for you to check out and if you are ever in
the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.