People have been asking for the return of Kpopalypse’s cooking posts, so here one is! This episode is all about cooking rice!
WHAT THE FUCK, LIKE, SERIOUSLY
It has come to my attention through various questions and comments that some of you people who visit this site don’t know how to fucking cook rice. Like, what the fuck, you’re into the k-pops (or maybe you were at one point but you’re not any more because you got smart, whatever, you’re still here reading this) so you should be able to get a bowl of steamed rice together, this should be mandatory. Let’s get that shit sorted right now so you can make perfect steamed rice every time without a rice cooker and call yourself a true caonima.
Rice looks good, eh
For steamed rice, you will need:
the rice of your choice
a pot with a lid
a stove
clean water (don’t laugh, where I live this is the hardest item on the list to get)
BUYING THE RICE
A five kilo sack of rice is the minimum quantity you should be buying, because any less than that and it’s kind of a rip-off per volume. Asian supermarkets will always have rice in sacks at cheap bulk prices, so get it there, and if there’s no Asian supermarkets where you live, then you’ll have to tolerate the evil western supermarket and just harass your local politicians to get some more Asian immigration happening in your area. Only go to western supermarkets if they have bulk quantities, don’t fuck with their pathetic tiny little bags of rice unless you have absolutely no choice. These pissy portions are designed for Asian-fetishising weirdos who cook rice once every six months because it’s “so exotic” or something, not true rice-eaters who would put rice in a syringe and inject it into their forearms every day if they could.
Sunrice is the standard rice that you can find in all Australian supermarkets – these small bags are a nope
“But when I get rice in bags from the Asian grocer it always has bugs in it” holy shit where are they getting their rice from, the fucking dumpster out the back of a k-pop agency? If people are selling you rice with bugs and critters in it, maybe consider buying the goddamn rice from somewhere where they clean the floors occasionally, just a thought. If it’s cheaper I’d still take the bug-ridden discount ghetto rice over supermarket rice though, it’s extra protein for your weak vegan ass and it’s not going to kill you probably. The better rice brands will have sacks that contain a plastic liner on the inside that will stop bugs getting in anyway.
5kg woven rice bag with internal plastic liner
There are different types of rice that you can get.
Long-grain white rice – the basic kind.
Short-grain rice – same thing but shorter, used more in sushi.
Brown rice – white rice but with the outer layer still on, preferred by health nuts and k-pop agencies.
Jasmine rice – similar to white rice but fragrant, white rice that has leveled up.
Basmati rice – the white rice that comes with Indian food, a drier kind of rice that mixes well with curries.
Glutinous rice – used in desserts. Harder than diamonds in uncooked form.
Berry rice/red rice – purple and a nice halfway between white and brown rice.
Black rice – insanity.
Multigrain rice – you can actually buy rice blends that are part white, part brown/berry etc.
For most applications, long grain white rice, jasmine and basmati rice are all good and all fairly interchangeable, so if you’re a rice newb I’d start with these.
SELECTING THE POT (NOT THAT KIND)
The size and material doesn’t matter, but it needs to able to hold, at minimum, three times the amount of rice you want to cook in it. Don’t buy an absolutely massive-ass pot if you’re only cooking for yourself though as it will be really hard to get temperature right. The pot must have a lid, most modern lids are glass but the lid can be made of anything, it doesn’t have to be transparent, as seeing the rice as it cooks is not important. However it must have a tiny pinhole in the lid to let steam out. Any modern pot should have this but some older ones might not. If you have an old style metal lid and you’re game you can use a small drill bit to drill a hole, just make sure you clamp the lid down firmly as you do it so you don’t slice your fingers off.
Steam hole in lid circled
THE STOVE
Gas is better than electric for this, due to the delay in temperature change when using an electric stove, but you can still get by on electric, you might just need to alter the timings if it’s an ancient stove that takes a while to change between hotplate temperature states.
GETTING WATER
If you’re lucky you live in a place where there is an occasional natural phenomenon known as “rain” where water just kind of randomly falls from the sky. I’m yet to experience this myself, so if you live in a city on the edge of a massive desert like I do then just rob the water truck when it comes through your neighbourhood on its fortnightly run. This recipe is really good and I promise the jail time is probably worth it.
DON’T WASH THE RICE, YOU FUCKWIT
The first step is to put the rice in the pot. Do not wash the rice. A lot of people wash the rice to remove starch and make the rice fluffier, which is a nice idea in theory but in practice it doesn’t make any difference. It’s the water to rice ratio that makes rice fluffy, not whether you rinse it beforehand or not, and removing rice starch does nothing as that also vanishes in the cooking water during the process. On top of this, by doing a rinsing process the rice is taking on extra water and pre-softening slightly so you’re messing up your ratio calculations. If you’re worried about the rice being dirty or whatever, don’t be, because the water you’re cooking it in is going to be hot and that’s already going to kill germs.
Don’t do this, idiot
ADDING WATER
Now that your rice is in the pot, even it out so the surface of the rice is flat, then add water to it. How much water to add is dependent on the type of rice you are cooking. There’s no need to measure in cups, ml etc, I just stick my finger into the rice and use it as a measuring stick, because it’s the ratio that’s important, not the quantity. Exact ratios vary depending on pot sizes and stove strengths, but your ratio of rice to water is probably going to be somewhere between 1:2 and 2:1 depending on your rice type. In the below diagram the purple shows the rice level in the pot, and the blue line is the water level.
Water:rice ratios
1:2 – for jasmine rice, white rice
1:1 – for basmati rice, berry rice
2:1 – for brown rice, black rice, any other rice that’s hard like a bullet
There’s no way of being completely sure because the pot and the stove both make a different, use the above as a guide and then experiment.
THE COOKING PROCESS
Once the water has been added to the rice, heat it up on a small or medium size stove hotplate. Leave the lid off. When the water gets to the point where it’s just starting to boil a very tiny bit (a few small bubbles appearing but not “full boil”), immediately do two things:
Turn the hot plate down to the lowest heat setting that it can go without it being actually off
Put the lid on the pot
Now start a timer alarm. Once again, the timer length will depend on the rice type. The following are ballpark figures that will vary slightly depending on your kitchen setup.
15 minutes – for jasmine rice, white rice
20 minutes – for basmati rice, berry rice
45 minutes – for brown rice, black rice, any other insane rice
While you are waiting, DO NOT LIFT THE LID at any time during the cooking process. Just relax, do other shit and wait for your timer to expire. If you live with other people tell them not to lift the lid under penalty of death, as many a rice batch has been ruined by curious house-sharers who did not understand the way of caonima rice action. As the rice cooks, you’ll see steam escaping from the pinhole in the lid of the pot, this is normal. Once the timer expires, turn the heat off, and let the pot sit, wait another 10 minutes. Again, keep the lid on. Once the ten minutes have expired, you can remove the lid and your rice should be ready to eat.
RESULTS AND WHAT THEY MEAN
Perfect fluffy rice – congratulations you are a true rice cooking caonima
Perfect fluffy rice but some of it went brown and stuck to the bottom of the pot – use a smaller hotplate next time, if you have one. If you’re already using the smallest one available, reduce cooking time by a couple minutes next time. This can also happen if you’re using a pot that is too large.
Too high a heat or too long a cook time will scorch the bottom of the rice
Rice is hard on top but soft and wet once you dig under the surface – either you lifted the lid yourself, or you didn’t have a big enough pot and the lid lifted anyway because the rice expanded so much that it prised the lid off the pot. Use a bigger pot next time, or just cook less rice in the pot you have.
Too much rice in the pot will expand and lift up the lid during cooking, fucking your shit
Rice is dry and too hard all over – you didn’t use enough water, so there wasn’t enough liquid to absorb into the rice and make it fluffly, increase water levels next time.
Rice is soft and mushy all over – you used too much water and the rice couldn’t absorb it all. Use less water next time.
This is not it
Rice is too hard all over AND kind of soggy at the same time – you didn’t cook the rice for long enough, add at lest five minutes to your cooking time.
Rice came out perfect but water bubbled everywhere and it made a mess of the stove – perhaps your pot doesn’t have a pinhole in the lid. If it does, the pinhole might not be letting out steam quickly enough to stop the pressure from building up. Check nothing is obstructing it. If the hole was a DIY job you might need to widen it a little.
DO I NEED TO WORRY ABOUT ALL THIS NONSENSE IF I JUST USE A RICE COOKER?
A rice cooker takes some of the brain work out of rice cooking. A rice cooker is basically just a pot that will stop cooking automatically once the rice is done, saving you the problem of accidentally burning it or overcooking. It’ll also keep your rice warm for later, although you’ll have some pretty germy-ass rice if you leave it in the rice cooker for multiple days. Note that the water to rice ratios above will still apply when cooking using a rice cooker, so you can still run into problems if you get those levels wrong.
CAN I COOK IT IN THE MICROWAVE
No, cunt.
Well, actually you probably can, but don’t do this, because it just seems lame somehow, I don’t know.
BUT I LIKE FRIED RICE NOT STEAMED
You can directly fry your rice straight after you steam it, but it’s better to cool it in the fridge first. Rice fries best after it’s been left in the fridge overnight. When leaving rice in the fridge make sure the container is airtight, and run a fork through the rice a whole bunch to separate the grains before you put it in the fridge, otherwise when you get it out the next morning to fry the rice, it’ll be hard like a brick and you’ll need a hammer and chisel to break it up first.
I won’t go through frying rice in this post, I’ll leave that for another time. Anyway, that’s all for this post – have fun not sucking at cooking rice! Kpopalypse will return!
