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SCENE 1
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Half an hour west of La Fayette sits Crowley, Louisiana, rice capitol of the world. Once we obtained lodging it was time to crack the rice mystery.
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RICE Rice HOTEL |
GUEST: Old Lady
So, we started at ground zero. We're not
sure when rice was first cultivated, but we're pretty sure that it happened around
the Kohrat region of Northern Thailand about 5,000 BC. We know that the
Chinese were cultivating rice by 28 hundred BC because we've gotten written
records of it. But by the 4th century BC, the Indians were actually shipping
rice to Greece. From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to Persia,
over the Nile River Delta into Africa where rice just loved the savannah
wetlands and rice went really well with the gumbos there.
Now, American colonists wouldn't taste rice until about 1625,
when luck would have it, a storm-beaten galleon bound for Madagascar limped into
Charleston Harbor. Now, a local planter lent assistance and was rewarded
by the captain with a small bag of golden seeds. Now, odds are he would
have rather have had the gold, but things worked out pretty well for him.
See,
the Carolina lowlands were the perfect place to grow rice. But the mud
was so soft, the machinery, even oxen, just sank into it. So, it had to be worked
by hand, hence slavery. It was rice, not cotton, that began the plantation
era in the South. Not only could the African slaves do the work, they had
the knowledge of the rice from their homeland. By the early 18 hundreds,
Charleston was shipping out some 50,000 tons of Carolina Gold Rice per year and
it was considered to be some of the finest rice in the world.
Well, the end of the Civil War brought the end of slavery and
it ended the rice cultivation in the Carolinas. But by then, somebody had
already figured out that the low river areas around Louisiana, east Texas and
Arkansas, not only could support rice, but the heavy machinery needed to cultivate
it in modern times. So today, most of America's rice is cultivated in
states like Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, Louisiana and California.
The folks at the mill gave me the grand tour:
showed me how
the husk is removed to make brown rice and how the bran is removed to make
white rice. Even showed me the laser that sorts out the broken bits. Then I went over and checked out the rice
cooking competition, the rice eating
competition and even the rice threshing competition. But I still hadn't
found what I was looking for. Why is rice light-and-fluffy one day and a
solid block of goo the next? Finally, a long time rice cooker broke the
silence. A rice cooker? Imagine my surprise.
The self-appointed rice capitol of America, Crowley has been throwing this little October Harvest party for, I don't know, 60 years? During the day time, it's all rice: growing rice, threshing rice, cooking rice and a lot of eating rice. But come ...
... night time, it's just a big party.
Complicated machinery and secret methodologies aside, there's just no substitute for knowing your ingredients.
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There are literally thousands of varieties of rice. From the foothills of the Himalaya come the long, lightly perfumed basmati grains. Tar Baby-like sticky rices from the paddies of Japan, the amazing self-saucing arborio rices from Northern Italy, Thailand's jasmine offers its heady perfume at a fraction of basmati's price. Now appearing in a paella near you, Spain's Valencia. We have wehani, texmati, della, blue, red, black japonica, wild rice which isn't really rice to begin with—it's an aquatic grass—and even white rice. When it comes to rice cooking there're only two questions you got to ask: first, what's the grain length and second, how is it processed?
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IN HUSK, OUT OF HUSK, POLISHED PRECOOKED, PARBOILED BLACK JAPONICA, WEHANI SHORT GRAIN, MEDIUM GRAIN, LONG GRAIN ARBORIO, POPCORN SUSHI, DELLA, BROWN, SWEET WILD GOOD OL' AMERICAN LONG GRAIN WHITE RICE |
| Each of the 10,000 plus different varieties of rice fall
within three commercial classifications: long grain, medium grain and, you
guessed it, short grain.
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Blackboard Medium: Fluffy then Sticky, Long: Fluffy, 6 mm + |
| Short grain rices are grown mostly in Asia and California, and when cooked, these stubby little guys are sticky enough to be formed into Sushi or picked up easily with chopsticks. In a strange, double, malapropian twist, short grain rices are often called sweet or glutinous rices despite the fact that they don't taste sweet at all and they contain no gluten whatsoever. |
Short Grain |
| The starch coat on medium grain rices like Italy's famed arborio can be coaxed right off of the grain producing the characteristic creaminess of risotto and rice pudding. Now although fluffy when first cooked, medium grain rices get sticky as they cool down. But since their starch doesn't crystallize, they're a good choice for salads and cold dishes. |
Medium Grain |
| At four to six times longer than they are wide, long grain
rices don't release starch into their surroundings the way medium or short grain
rices do. So, what do you get? Beautiful, fluffy, individual,
relatively dry grains. In other words, American rice.
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Long Grain |
Now, long grain rices are great all-purpose rices, except when it comes to cold dishes. See, the starch in these grains crystallizes when cooked and cooled which results in rock hard little grains. When reheated, though, the crystals do dissolve again. So what is bad for, say, salad is good for fried rice.
Due to their popcorn-like fragrance, long
grain rices like
basmati and jasmine are called "aromatic" rices.
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Once it's threshed off the ear, each grain is still encased in a husk. Remove the husk and, voilà, brown rice. See, like most grains, the inner part of the kernel, or endosperm, is surrounded by a thin layer of bran which is where most of the nutrients are. Since its a tough little cuss, brown rice needs about 3 times as much water and time to cook as the same amount of white rice. The hassle is worth it, though, because brown rice has a great nutty flavor and a stronger nutritional punch than its buffed up brother. It can be sold as is or the bran can be rubbed off to reveal the pearly white underneath.
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IN HUSK OUT OF HUSK Bran 3 x H2O/Time Polished |
White and converted rice will keep for years on the shelf as long as you keep them in air tight containers with lids. I like these kind of big-mouth jobbies, easy scooping. Now, brown rice on the other hand is a completely different matter because, remember, it's still got the bran on it and the bran means oil and oil will go rancid in just 6 months on the shelf. The answer is the freezer. In here you can keep it for one to two years. But, since fats oxidize and pick up off flavors, the thing to do is to keep it inside a zip-lock bag and then keep that inside another sealed container. Spoilage foiled again.
Rice bran oil is nearly flavorless & has a very high smoke point.
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Oh. Dang.
[rice cooked badly]
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[Dog dish]
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GUEST: "W", Equipment Specialist
Customer
Robot
Before settling on a cooking method, I thought I'd better check out the rice cooker scene with my equipment specialist, W.
W: I thought you weren't going to come around so often.
AB: Hello, W. I need everything you've got on rice cookers.
W: Come on.
The ever helpful W strutted her wares. The cookers ranged from simple heated pots or buckets, ...
... even, to a fuzzy logic
model that not only cooked rice to perfection but scared
the heck out of the
dogs while delivering it. Mysteriously, all these machines seemed to grasp
some piece of knowledge that had alluded me.
ROBOT: [rolls up to AB with a
pot of rice]
AB: [samples, nods approvingly, shoos him
away]
ROBOT: Thank you ???, Master.
W: Rice cookers work so well because they know something
that you
can't.
AB: The Colonel's secret 11 herbs and spices.
W: No. The temperature inside the pot.
AB: Yeah?
W: When all the water's been absorbed by the rice the temperature begins to increase. Sensors then pick up on the change, tell the machine to let the
rice rest and keep it warm until service.
AB: Wow. Sensors. I'll take it.
W: Uh, not this one. We're going to keep it simple for you.
AB: Eh.
We gave a few of the models a spin and
several did an excellent job, especially with brown rice—traditionally tricky
because of its longer cooking time. Many models doubled as steamers, too. We even made some pretty decent
jambalayas. So, if you cook
rice a lot, don't mind spending 50 to 100 bucks or more, and have counter or
cabinet space to spare you have our blessing. Now, the microwave cooker we
tested didn't save any time but it performed consistently and freed up valuable
stove and oven space.
The problem is, you can't make risotto in a rice cooker. And what's worse, you can't make
pilaf. It seems the word 'pilaf' is from
the Persian, pilaw, means rice dish. Well, there's a little more
to it than that. A pilaf always starts with long grain rice, and it's
always sautéed in a bit of fat, usually butter, before any liquid is added to
the pan.
| Now, like most of our favorite dishes, pilafs make excellent freezer, fridge and pantry Velcro. Today's pilaf will feature things we just scared up from around the kitchen. We've got some green peas—frozen is fine but we'll thaw them—we've got some leftover onion that we've chopped, about half an onion, half a red bell pepper, an orange, a bay leaf and some chicken stock. |
Green Peas |
| And, there might be one more ingredient but it's a secret. Kind of a personal thing. Excuse me. Saffron. I'm just going to get hold of a few of these precious little strands and bloom them in hot water. More on this later. |
Saffron
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| One of the two secrets to rice cookery is heat management. Now, since this [oven] is one of the few heated environments we can really control and trust, it's my favorite place for cooking pilaf. We'll start over on the cook top but finish in here at 350º. |
350º |
| Okay, let's light this candle. Two tablespoons of butter melted over whatever medium happens to be on your range. |
2 Tbsp Butter |
Now, I
like a pan that is wider than it is tall. But you can use any heavy sauce
pan as long as it's got a tight fitting lid. Now, when the butter melts
add your onion and your bell pepper along with a couple of pinches of kosher
salt. Stir to coat then turn down the heat.
We want this to sweat,
not to brown or sauté. You want to cook it slowly until the aromatics
become soft and fragrant.
Now, these ingredients do not a pilaf make. Pilaf is a method.
Even if nothing ended up in this pan but rice, a little fat and
water it will still be a pilaf.
Now, the second secret to happy rice is finding the right
ratio of rice to liquid. The instructions on your average bag of rice
always says the same thing, "1 cup rice, 2 cups water." If that
were right, and I don't think it is, one could deduce that a 2 to 1 water/rice
ratio would always be the way to go no matter how much rice was involved. Well, it isn't that
way. Not only are 2 cups of water more than any
respectable cup of long grain rice needs, but the proportion of water to rice
actually goes down the more rice you cook. Here's how we see it.
| Now, for the sake of argument we will restrict our demonstration to American long grain white rice. One cup of rice will cook very nicely, thank you, in 1 1/2 cups of water. It seems pretty simple, right? But, the plot thickens. |
1 1/2 Cups H2O |
| Two cups of rice will cook perfectly in 2 3/4 cups of water. Wait, it gets even weirder. |
2 3/4 Cups H2O |
| Three cups of rice can be cooked to perfection in 3 1/2 cups of water. |
3 1/2 Cups H2O |
Which obviously makes it seem apparent that the more rice you cook the less water you need. Now, if you have a slide rule and you know how to use it you could probably figure out some handy formula or at the very least come up with a good comedy routine. "Hey, Abbot. When are we going to have more rice than watuh?"
In Japan, rice fields are often named like people.
Our veggies are soft and fragrant, so it's time to add the rice. I'm going with two cups of American long grain polished rice, not converted. |
2 Cups Long Grain |
Pressure steamed prior to milling,
converted or par-boiled rice retains
many of the bran's nutrients, which explains its
golden color.
I'm going to stir to coat and turn up the
heat. I want the butter to get hot enough to kind of caramelize some of
the sugars that are on the outside starch of the rice kernel. That's going
to give the pilaf its characteristic nutty flavor. How long to cook? Well, until you smell nuts. Every good cook I know is
constantly tasting and smelling things. Why trust your nose? It grew
where it is specifically to help you find stuff to eat. So take a lesson
from your dog and listen to your nose.
[sniff, sniff ... sniff] I smell nuts. Sure thing. Three and a half
minutes. And our rice has taken on a beautiful gold color
and definitely a nutty aroma.
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So, we're ready to add the rest of the ingredients. We're going to start with the liquid. We've got a total of 2 and 3/4 cups because we've got 2 cups of rice. Now, a quarter cup of that has been used to steep the saffron and you can tell that it's already let go of a lot of its gorgeous color. It's going to perfume and color the whole batch. So, in it goes along with the rest of the stock. I want to wash out the saffron bowl to get all that color out. Great. Give it a stir. |
2 3/4 Cup Liquid |
I'm going to toss in a bay leaf, ah, what the heck, two bay
leaves and about a 1 inch wide strip of orange zest. Now the most important ingredient,
salt. Rice, like
any starch has got to be cooked with salt or it won't matter how much you add
later, it will never taste right. Now, I like to get this up to about, I
don't know, seawater flavor so I'm going to add a teaspoon and a half of salt,
give it a stir and then taste it ... not with the fingers I had in the salt. Good.
Bring the heat up to high, stir it once and then throw away
the spoon. Never again will a spoon t... No, never again will a spoon
touch this rice. Let it come to a boil.
I love that time folding trick.
We have a boil so it's
time to talk about lids. We need a tight cover that won't let steam sneak
out of the pan. Here's a cool trick. Say you've got a boil, which we
do, turn off the heat and then spread a barely moist dish towel over the pan. Then cover and fold up the
edges. This is also going to keep
condensation from dripping off the lid back into the pan. Okay, in the
oven.
Now, you may have to rearrange the racks to get the handle in
a bit. Set your timer for 15 minutes and walk away. You know, I feel
good about the 15 minutes because I know my oven is at a cozy 350º. How
do I know? Because I've got a thermometer in there to tell me so. Now, rice bag instructions have to be a little bit vague for cooking times
because they can't be sure about your range heat anymore than they can microwave
wattage. So, they have to average a guess.
The fall flowering crocus is ground zero for
saffron. Each tiny flower contains three little threadlike stigma which
have to be picked by hand. Now, if you picked this patch and about 43,000
more just like it—it's about 5 of these infields
worth—you'd have a pound of
saffron with a market value of about a $1,000 making saffron the most expensive
food on earth.
Now, Kashmir saffron is the best. It's easily
recognized by its solid red threads. Now, Spanish and Turkish saffron
like this can contain up to 10% yellow stamens so they're a wee bit less intense.
Personally, I don't notice the difference in flavor as much as
the difference in price which can be substantial. Now, luckily a little
goes a long way. We only used about a quarter's worth for our pilaf.
Now, we suggest you buy saffron from a specialty spice
catalogue, not from a
store where it may have been laying around losing its punch.
And never settle for crushed or powdered
saffron. It's almost
always been cut with turmeric. Now, keep your saffron in a heavy plastic
bag or a jar with an air tight lid. The safe, is optional.
[beep, beep] What's that? Fifteen minutes
already?
Fight with all your might the urge to open
that lid for at least 10 minutes. Fifteen would be better. Twenty
would be okay. See, there's still a lot of heat in there. That rice
is still cooking. You open that lid now, whew, well, that rice will miss
its
one shot at being all it can be. And believe me, a grain is a terrible thing to waste. And don't
worry. If something did go wrong in there, odds are
we can fix it.
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Okay, break time is over. You can look at your rice if you're ready with a bowl or a serving platter to turn it out into. Ah, looks great. |
15 Minutes Later |
But, danger lurks just below the
surface. See, the
starch is a little unstable. Stirring could turn the whole thing into a
gummy mess. So, turn it out onto a large platter. Just let the
grains fall where they want to go. Now, you may fluff the rice.
Use a large serving fork or a pasta fork and go ahead and
take out the zest and the bay leaf. They have given their all. And
now it's time to go with the peas. The rice is plenty hot enough to warm
it through. If you want to get fancy, consider, maybe, golden raisins or,
my favorite, chopped pistachios. That is a fine looking pilaf.
Now, rice is, it's not manufactured. It's a natural
product and every grain is different. Every crop is different. And because of that, you can't very well expect every pot of rice to be the
same. What I'm getting to is that even if you do everything right, occasionally
there's going to be an accident. But most of them are fixable.
For instance: if you cook your rice and it's done but a
little watery, just drain it in a colander, put it back on a sheet pan or jelly
roll pan, put it in the oven for about 5 minutes. It will dry up. If
it's a little on the underdone side just drop, say, a cup, well, half a cup even
of hot water in the pan, slap on the lid and wait five minutes. The steam
will cook it the rest of the way. If on the other hand your rice is gooey
and gummy and mushy, well, consider finding yourself a good rice pudding recipe.
Or do what I do, feed it to the dog.
In China, quitting a job is referred to as "breaking the rice bowl".
Considering its history, versatility, cultural significance and the fact that it's cultivated on every continent on earth except for one, you might say that we've just barely cracked the book on rice. But we hope that you know more than you did half an hour ago.
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Just remember: short is sticky, long is fluffy, white cooks quicker than brown. Now brown smokes "converted," nutritionally speaking, but converted does edge out white just by a hair.
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Short is sticky Long is fluffy White cooks quicker Brown smokes converted nutritionally Converted edges out |
And consider this fun fact: of all the rice cultures on earth every one of them considers rice to be a symbol of fertility, which is why we've been throwing this [rice] at weddings for the last few millennium and not corn cobs, small watermelons, or live fish. See you next time on Good Eats.
Visit us on the web at www.foodtv.com.
Last Edited on 08/27/2010
Each day, about two-thirds of the people on this
planet fuel up on rice. And why not? It's nutritious, versatile,
delicious, economical. It's even hypoallergenic. Yet still, there
are a lot of Americans who don't know pilaf from paella any more than they
can tell the difference between texmati and arborio. In short, rice is
still just a little bit mysterious. And since we are doggedly
determined
to decipher all culinary conundrums, we have no choice but to fling ourselves
in this tiny, vulnerable, woefully underpowered aircraft into the heart of
Cajun country. That's right. We're going to find our answers at
the International Rice Festival in Crowley, Louisiana. Oh, and by the way, this is definitely Good Eats.
