You feel the first pangs of hunger. You run to the kitchen searching for anything to satiate it. You look in the refrigerator -- nothing but a moldy lemon, some expired milk and a half-eaten jar of pickles.
Tearing through the cupboards, you find empty boxes, finished weeks ago and never thrown away -- but no food.
Just when you are about to give up, you spot something -- a forgotten bag of rice at the very back of the shelf. Images of a steaming pile of fluffy white grains excite your ravenous stomach.
You happily follow the rules you learned somewhere, maybe from mom or dad, or maybe a distant aunt. You pour a cup of rice into a pot, add two cups of water, put on a lid and turn on the stove.
Twenty agonizing minutes later, you run to the stove and remove the cover. Instead of a pillowy cloud of separate rice grains, you have what looks like a giant starchy amoeba. To add insult to injury, your rice blob is burned securely to the bottom of the pot.
Almost this exact scenario is part of the life of third-year Engineering student Akhil Sehgal. Sehgal said his mother taught him to cook rice using "two parts water and one part rice" and heating it uncovered on medium heat. He does not add any other ingredients, including salt or oil. When all of the water is evaporated, he checks to see if it is done.
"It's usually not fully cooked the first time, so I add more water and let that evaporate," Sehgal said. The result of this process, he said, is a "pack of rice," which means no distinguishable grains and very gummy. On the up side, Sehgal's rice does not burn to the bottom of the pan.
Home cooks are not the only people with rice related troubles.
"Considering how easy it is to cook rice, Dining Services really does a piss-poor job," second-year College student Mike Quinzio said. "The rice is always too hard or too mushy."
Since some students are dissatisfied with the rice Dining Services offers, they must go elsewhere to get delectable rice. This often means back to the kitchen.
Simply because home cooks have yet to cook first-rate rice does not mean that they cannot. Making excellent rice is a slightly more complicated process than one might think, but it is a process almost anyone can learn.
According to Alton Brown, cookbook author and host of the Food Network show "Good Eats," the ratio of water to rice most home cooks use is wrong.
"The instructions on your average bag of rice always say 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," Brown has said on the show. "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."
For one cup of rice, Brown recommends one and a half cups of water, for two cups of rice two and three quarters cups of water and for three cups of rice, three and a half cups water.
According to Brown, seasoning is of the utmost importance to rice. "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," Brown said. This means the water must be salted to taste before cooking the rice.
Oil is another common ingredient in making rice. Adding canola, vegetable or peanut oil -- not anything with a strong taste -- can help the rice grains from sticking together.
Heating instructions for steamed rice vary slightly, but most resemble those on Nishiki brand rice: "Bring to a soft boil; reduce heat to low and simmer covered, for 20 minutes...remove from heat; let stand, covered, 10 minutes." No stirring or even opening the pot is required.
In fact, rather than stirring rice, which mashes the grains together, Brown advises fluffing at the end of the process. This means gingerly pushing the tongs of a fork to the bottom of the rice and carefully pulling the fork up. This turns the rice over and adds air to the mixture, which makes it even fluffier.
With regard to fluffing, Brown advises, "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."
So the next time a stray bag of rice is the only way to satisfy your hunger pangs, don't end up with a burned, sticky mass. Follow Chef Brown's instructions to a fluffy, separated, pillowy, delectable, well-seasoned, perfectly textured pot of rice.
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