[recipe below]
John: All right, so this is going to be—I’ll have the recipe in the next newsletter. Get on the newsletter!
The tip is: If you’re going to cook rice—use Basmati rice. Learn how to cook it.
Adam: I think we’ve discussed Basmati rice.
John: We have discussed it, but not as an official tip of the day.
Adam: No, 2011 even, yes.
John: I have a couple of brands I like. Fawn brand is a good one. They have a Sela, which means it’s been parboiled.
Adam: But wait, now explain. Why should we be cooking Basmati rice? Why do we need to learn this? What is the tip?
John: It’s because it’s a fabulous product, is the reason. Once you start cooking Basmati rice and you know what you’re doing, you will never cook other rice. You just say, screw it, I’m not going to bother with it. But you have to understand a couple of things, which will be in the recipe, but I’ll mention it here.
First of all, the tip is: Pakistani, not Indian.
Adam: Oh boy. This is a cultural issue.
John: Yes, it is. And for good reason. The Pakistani product is superior and a lot cleaner. You buy Indian Basmati, you will be rinsing it forever.
Adam: Are you saying Indians are dirty?
John: I’m saying the rice is.
And if you can find it—some of it comes out of Bangladesh—but I’ve seen some out of Pakistan. Baby Basmati. Wow. That’s a rice. But it’s hard to come by. You can get it on the West Coast here and there. But Baby Basmati is even the best. The two brands I like are regular Basmati: Thon and Zebra. But there’s lots of good brands—if they’re from Pakistan.
Adam: So do I smell a new book coming?
John: Yes, it’s the Dvorak Family Cookbook.
Adam: Oh, this one will actually happen because Jay’s involved and Mimi’s involved. The Dvorak Family Cookbook. Wow. When can we expect this gem?
John: Pretty soon. I’m not going to make promises, but it’s almost done, actually. I have Rachel, the copy editor, lined up.
Adam: Oh, that’s excellent. I’m so happy for you.
John: But anyway, so: Pakistani Basmati is what you’re looking for, and skip the Indian stuff. And the last thing I’ll say—it’s a boiled rice. If you see a recipe telling you how to cook it and they don’t tell you to rinse it a lot, they don’t know what they’re doing. If you have a recipe that tells you to cook it with one-and-a-half cups of water to one cup of rice, they don’t know what they’re doing. Throw that recipe out. It’s a boiled rice. You boil it in a pile of water—lots of water—and you pour the water off when it’s cooked. You don’t boil it like Chinese rice, where you’ve got the one-and-a-half cups or a cup or this or that. Bullcrap.
Basmati Rice Recipe
(taken from the newsletter)
John promised to publish the recipe for correctly cooling basmati rice, The methodology is unlike normal rice cooking and produces a superior product. This is based on a recipe used in Iran, a country which also produces high-end basmati rice itself.
As mentioned on the show, start with a good Pakistani-based product. Fawn is particularly good.
There are a lot of ways to cook rice, few recipes tell you how to cook basmati rice properly – the Iranian way.
Methodology
The way good basmati is cooked is as follows: Wash a cup of basmati rice until the water runs clear. With most rices it takes 4-6 rinses.
Let the rice soak for 10-30 minutes. There should 3X-5X more water than rice. Bring pot to a boil. This is a boiled rice. Nobody talks about boiled rice much, but this is how it’s done. You boil the rice for about 8 minutes depending on the rice itself. You can salt the water or add chicken stock.
You have to keep an eye on this rice and watch how the cooking progresses. It takes making rice this way about 5 times before you get it right. It’s a touchy-feelie kind of thing. The rice starts to expand, and the white inner grain can be seen. When the rice is about 4/5 cooked (a slightly firm inner core, eventually you can tell by merely looking at the rice when this point is reached) you dump it out of the water through a strainer or sieve. Before all the water runs off the rice you toss it back into the pot, cover the pot with a lid with a towel under the lid to capture the steam so it does not fall back on the rice.
Leave the burner on for 30 seconds. Then shut it down and let the rice steam to completion. This is all finicky and you’ll have to do it a few times to get the hang of it. The variables are: boiling time, how much water is drained off, burner reheat time, retained heat of pot.
After about a few minutes you can put in a large chunk of butter to let it melt during the slow steaming process. Do not stir in right away or it will coat the still steaming rice retarding the moisture absorption. After about 10-15 minutes you give the rice one quick stir with a fork to fluff it up and you have perfect basmati rice cooked properly. Each grain should be separate, and the rice should not be mushy or rock hard.