It's My Rice in a Pot

Please sing the title to the tune of “Dick in a Box.” Which was my mother’s idea. Love it!

Up until last year I didn’t understand cooking Japanese rice in a pot. I was just born with rice cooker on hand. Honestly. So when I moved to London for semester and accepted that I wouldn’t have my rice cooker, I realized it was time to learn to cope without it. After three times of awful experimenting, me and my Sansei mother finally had to resort to the Internet for a real recipe. So here’s the recipe, written by a Chinese girl who totally understands my plight.

1-Clean the rice. Swish it around in the pot a few times.

2- Put water in the pot, until it is about 3/4 of an inch above the top of the rice. A good way to measure this is to stick your thumb in -- the water should be about 1 joint of your thumb above the rice.(I use a one to two ratio. One cup of rice to two cups of water)

3-Put pot on stove, turn heat on high, and wait until it starts boiling. Like, actually boiling.

4-When it starts boiling, cover the pot with a lid and turn the heat down as LOW AS IT CAN POSSIBLY GO.

5-DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT TAKE OFF THE LID for at least 12 minutes. In fact, just walk away from the stove for 12 minutes. Just walk away!

6-After 12 minutes, if you're super impatient like me, you can take off the lid and look at the rice. It's not totally cooked! Surprise! Alright, put the lid back on (quickly!) and let it sit there for another 2 minutes on low heat. Then turn off the heat. And do not take off the lid. And let it sit there for about 10 minutes.

7-After 12, and then 2, and then 10 (that's 24) minutes, you can take the lid off, your rice will be perfect, and you can fluff it with chopsticks and serve!


NB: Japanese rice is short grain white rice. Not long grain Thai sweet rice, not long grain Chinese rice, not long grain anything! I don’t know why people have a hard time understanding the concept of short grain rice (which some people sushi rice, though that’s a totally different thing). But whenever I talk about this, people think I mean something that’s easy to cook, like brown rice. I’m not bitching, this is serious biz-nass!