Editor’s Note: Another question from the forums here. Seems like a lot of words to explain a very simple process but that’s what it takes to get it just right on the first go. Took me a while to sort out the details myself. You’ll memorize the technique soon after a few pot’s worth of success. Good luck curry warriors.
Properly cooked Indian-style basmati rice eluded me for many years. The sort you love from your favourite local curry hut. I made plenty of miserable, stodgy pots of gruel masquerading as rice in my earliest cookery days. I just didn’t understand how varied types of rice could behave so differently in the kitchen. One part rice to two parts water, right? Not so fast there curry wrangler.
I love a good Arborio risotto as much as my trusty and cheap American long grain served under gumbo but every permutation of rice needs its own special attention to get the texture just right. Basmati particularly so. Skill here is in fact a common judgement of a cook’s character in India. The grains have to be separate and distinct. The bite could rival any pasta aficionado’s al dente. And it must arrive at the table still gently steaming its perfume into the whole meal. Even the most delectable curry ‘gravy’ won’t save a cook from substandard rice making the whole affair a non-starter.
If you don’t have an Indian grandmother to teach you, every cook from every province will gleefully tell you how they make their own. After reading countless ‘it’s easy, really’ anecdotes awash with casual directions that ended in failure I gave up and resigned myself to ordering rice with takeaways which always seemed determined to arrive lukewarm at best.
A decade later when I moved to places that don’t have takeaways, I had to take up the challenge again and figured out that there are two secrets to basmati success. Firstly you have to cold soak for half an hour before cooking. That’s a common tip heard time and again from experts and amateurs alike. Fair enough but there’s a catch to this trick coming in the thick of the method.
The second and more important secret is that the water ratio takes no prisoners and must be far more accurate than your Auntie from Delhi leads you believe. I can only suspect she wants to preserve some of her kitchen mystique until you sort it out on your own after the first nine hundred mediocre batches. Scientific accuracy to the rescue. Don’t try to fake this with volume measures. That’s why you’re here reading this – it doesn’t work. At least not until you’ve made a lot of substandard practice rice.
This type of precision is exactly what good, cheap scales of the 21st Century were made to accomplish. The pitfall comes when you try to incorporate the first secret of pre-soaking. The point of that is to allow the rice to more easily absorb water during cooking but it takes up a fair bit of liquid even during the cold soak. You have to account for that in the water equation. Just to confuse things, it’s also a moving target from batch to batch and brand to brand. I’ve not yet tested a computer-driven appliance that can get it right every time. Japan would have worked it out by now if they ate much basmati but nearly all of their rice technology is focused on the very different short grain varieties.
This method doesn’t apply to any other species of rice including but not limited to jasmine, Arborio, American long grain, wild, brown, Japanese short grain, sticky, sweet, mochi, Mongolian beaver rice, Martian rice grown by Matt Damon, or any other rice haunting your market delicious as they may be in their own right.
Here are the steps, watch closely. Yield is roughly three cups volume of fork-fluffed finished rice and CAN be doubled given a big enough pot to allow full expansion without constraint. I suspect tripling would need small adjustments but my house doesn’t need that much in one sitting.
- WEIGH exactly 200 grams of dry, uncooked basmati rice. Volume can change a bit every batch so don’t get clever and only scale it your first time.
- Rinse the rice under cold water until it runs clear. I use a deep bowl and simply set it in the sink with the tap on low overflowing the side. Usually takes about a minute for the water to clear.
- Soak the rice in the full bowl of water for thirty minutes, perhaps a bit longer but don’t exceed an hour.
- Drain the rice completely.
- Return to your scale. With the weight of the pot tared out of your way, add the rice and enough fresh cold water to make a total of 640g. The detailed math is…
200g dry rice + X grams water absorbed + Y grams fresh water = 640 grams total.*
You will observe that the weight of the soaked rice is a bit different every time, usually around 70 grams more than dry, so X and Y are moving targets. - Toss in half a teaspoon of salt while you’re at it. A couple cardamom pods or a cinnamon stick to gild the lily if you like.
For example, say your original 200g of dry rice weighs 265g after soaking. You need to add (440g – 65g = 375g) additional water to the pot. The good news is that this second weighing helps level the playing field between the many and varied brands of rice on the global market. It may not completely negate any differences but it gets you closer to the mark.
* Yes observant readers, you could just perform the long soak in a premeasured amount of water to get the correct total but soaking is also a form of extended rinse that removes even more of the troublesome surface starch. It’s worth the extra math and fresh cooking water.
You can cook any way you please from here. Old-school pot with lid** to fancy electric rice cooker (on ‘hard’ setting if a specific basmati button isn’t available). I would NOT suggest using pressure cooking as it’s utterly unnecessary. Some fancy all-in-one machines that are a recent trend may or may not make a pig’s ear out of what you could otherwise do just as well if not better in fifteen minutes with a plain old pot so I’d probably skip those too unless you’re otherwise equipment impaired.
** For novice cooks that means bring to a boil, cook one minute, stir well all the way to the bottom one last time, add a lid, and reduce heat to low. Cook an additional four minutes, turn off the heat completely, and allow to sit for ten minutes undisturbed remembering not to take the lid off, not even once just to peek, until all the time has elapsed. Why fluff with a fork before serving? Because a spoon tends to compress cooked rice grains into mush.
If you want to get restaurant fancy as seen in the photo above, take a spoonful or two of your finished rice and place it into a small bowl where you’ve had a precious few strands of saffron steeping in hot water for five minutes. I hear a drop of food colouring might work too but I love any excuse to open the saffron vault. Wait about a minute and then strain out your now lovely yellow rice grains to mix back into the rest of the pristine white rice anxiously awaiting your curry.
