Simple Basic White Rice
I have discovered that many people are in search of how to make basic white rice which is fast, tasty and doesn’t require much effort to come out properly. So I give you my recipe which is for white rice, not brown, (see on the blog Excellent Basic Brown Rice ) and all you require to make it is the rice, water, salt and oil. When I make rice, I nearly always make 2 cups of raw rice worth, since I find even if we don’t consume the whole lot in one go, it can be repurposed oh so easily into fried rice, stuffing etc. etc. But you can easily halve the recipe, no worries.
One more important note. Start with cold water, do not boil the water first.
Take a colander/sieve and rinse your rice well to remove the excess starch.
Make sure you rinse all over.
Then gather your ingredients
and place everything together in a nice sized pot with a lid.
Yup, the whole shebang goes in together.
Make sure you use a pot deep enough for the rice to fluff up nicely. Stir all together, put lid on pot and bring to the boil. Do NOT walk away till the rice comes to the boil, the second it does, stir once, re-cover the pot and lower to lowest flame. Cook for fifteen minutes (put it on a timer) and turn off flame, leaving pot on the burner that’s turned off. Let sit for ten minutes.
Fluff with two forks. This fluffing bit is not a suggestion, this is what prevents the rice from compacting for lack of a better word which can cause (gasp, oh horror!!) clumping, that thing that we most do not desire.
This will give you lovely, tasty, fluffy rice that tastes good with nothing else added or all sorts of other stuff added!
Simple Basic White Rice
2 cups (370 grams) white Basmati or Persian rice
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons oil (canola or other vegetable oil)
4 cups (946 ml) cold water
Directions:
Put the rice into a colander/sieve and wash the rice. Let excess liquid drip off but no need to drip dry. Take a pot with a lid, deep enough for six cups cooked rice, which is what you end up with with this amount of dry rice. You can halve the recipe if you wish. Place washed rice, salt, oil and cold water in pot, stir together. Cover the pot and bring rice to the boil, keep an eye on it till it boils, stir pot once, replace lid and immediately lower flame to low simmer. Cook rice for 15 minutes (time it!) and turn off flame under pot but leave pot on turned off burner. Let sit another 10 minutes and fluff with two forks, all the way to the bottom of the pot so all the rice is “fluffed”, which prevents clumping. Serve hot.
This is how my mother taught me and it worked beautifully for American rice. However, I found it didn’t work so well for me for other types of rice, like basmati or Persian or Thai or jasmine. Could you give some tips on how to prepare different types of white rice?
This works very well for basmati and Persian. I’m not familiar with Thai rice so I wouldn’t advise you on that and Jasmine rice is the kind I use for Paella (see Estrella’s Paella) which has a slightly different texture. It can be a bit stickier so I don’t usually use it for plain white rice. For sushi type rice with a sticky texture, see my sushi recipe on the blog with instructions. Good luck!
Hi thank you for your recipes and great instructions.
This is off the topic: instead of golden syrup, available in South africa, in ginger cakes, what do you use.
TIA
It’s my great pleasure! Thanks for the feedback. Re: golden syrup, I would sub light corn syrup (I use Karo’s) for it. You could also try maple syrup but that comes with a maple flavor of course. The corn syrup has a similar texture and is sweet without particular flavoring so I would say it’s closest to what you want.