I’ve been cooking rice all wrong!

I've been cooking rice all wrong my entire life or to be more precise , I have no trouble with 1.5 cups of rice .

It's three and four cups that would always turn out motion .

I used to blame it on my instant , but 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's honor asked her mom how to cook rice .

Her mom said something like cover rice with water by a knuckle or a 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 .

Hi , everyone and welcome back to my channel today .

We'll be using these six simple steps to make the perfect rice .

Please remember to like and subscribe and I will see you on the next one .

So the first step is to rinse our rice for this demonstration .

I used two cups of rice and I added it to my strainer .

If you don't have a strainer , you can always use a bow and you can just rinse your rice around 2 to 3 times in your bowl to make sure that the water has ran clear after you've rinsed it off a couple of times .

You know , you don't have to do that if you don't want to .

Um But that's what I recommend 2 to 3 times for the strainer .

But what I'm trying to say is that for small quants 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 .

But that's not practical .

Most of us have only one rice cooker , one instant pot .

And even if you're cooking in a regular pot , you probably aren't changing pots to go from two cups to three 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 1.5 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 1.5 cups for the first batch , I cooked the amount that has always worked well for me , 1.5 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 .

Just run it under your tap for about 30 seconds and continue to rinse it and get all those particles out of there and just ensure that you keep all the contents of the strainer in the strainer .

And then once you feel satisfied with your rinsing , you have it sit there and drain for at least a minute .

And that is our second step .

So just leave it to sit for a sec and , you know , let all that water drain off because we don't want it to be overly saturate saturated .

And then we'll place that back in our rice cooker .

And to that , we'll be adding two cups of water for the two cups of rice .

Now , there's a method to the madness .

Ladies , gentlemen .

So hang in there and give that a quick stir and then we're gonna be adding some salt .

Um Not too much .

So at least two quarter or for a tablespoon , which is what I used here .

And then I'll be adding some butter .

I use the smart balance and I'll be adding one tablespoon of butter to the rice , the water and the salt .

So go ahead and add that in .

Give it a quick stir and then replace the lid and that concludes steps three , then step four , we're gonna give it a quick stir .

This is an optional step .

You don't have to stir , you can just leave it sitting there .

Um But I like to evenly spread out the butter .

So it gets in and through the rice .

And then here I'm doing a quick check because the favorite part of cooking rice for me is coming up , which is where we're going to add our chicken broth .

And this is the secret to making your rice taste amazing .

And for this , I added one cup of the chicken broth and just spread it out .

You know in the rice and then we're gonna give it a quick check and you just let it steam , let it sit there and steam and you know , check the consistency .

And for here and for me , I love a Shelly kind of rice , not too sticky .

Um And if you wanna make it sticky , you can always add more broth and let it cook some more .

But for this , that basically concludes the cooking of the rice .

When you use a rice cooker , once it's complete , it marks it as warm and step six is where you go ahead and just serve your rice .

But that is it .

Thank you so much for watching .

Remember to like and subscribe and thank you so much for hanging with me and I will catch you on the next one .

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 lead , 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 path doesn't change .

You might be wondering why I didn't include a measurement for one cup of rice .

I find that one cup is such a small amount that my six quart instant pot doesn't cook it well , it's also so tiny that I never have a need for one cup of rice .

But if you do need one cup , I would try to use the smallest diameter pot you have and use a 1 to 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 six 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 .