If you cook Japanese rice (or any rice), you can use a rice cooker. Of course, there are many good rice cookers available anywhere nowadays. But you may not have a rice cooker when you want to eat steamed rice suddenly!
Don’t worry, you can use a normal cooking pot to cook tasty steamed rice. I want to introduce the way to cook Japanese rice with a cooking pot in this post. The method may be okay for other types of rices but I cannot guarantee the taste 😉
- Wash Japanese rice
If your Japanese rice is not written as no-wash-rice (無洗米), you need to wash rices. You can take about 500 ml of rices for 4 people, then put them into a bowl. You can add a lot of tap water into the bowl and wash the rices by pushing with a hand. You can do it strong as row rice is very hard. After pushing several times, you can exchange the water a few times to remove the white clouds in the water. - Water Absorption
Now you can transfer your rice into a cooking pot (Or, actually you can do 1st step in a cooking pot). Cooking pot can be anything if it has flat bottom and a good lid. The cooking pot is slightly better if it is teflon coated, but not necessary. I am using below metal pot recently. You can soak the rice about 1 hour in same amount of water as rice (~500 ml in this case) to absorb the water. You may want to use filtered water if you are living in a big city. Water absorption step is very important when you cook the rice with a pot. Otherwise, you will get undercooked rice!!
A cooking pot for steamed rice - Cook
After waiting 1 hour, it’s time to start heating the cooking pot with a lid closed. Middle to high heat is good at first depends on a cooking top you have. Once you start to see the bubble from the water you can change the heat to low. Then, keep cooking 10 minutes. After 10 minutes you can turn off the heat. But don’t open the lid yet. Wait 10 minutes to steam the rice by remaining heat. After 10 minutes, open the lid and mix the rice. Now the rice is ready to eat 🙂
The rice may be a little hard or soft for the first time depends on your cooking top and/or cooking pot and/or kinds of rice. You can play with your heating way to get the best rice from your cooking pot 😉
BTW, it’s easy to get good Japanese rice in US or in Europe. US has good rices from california while Europe has good ones from Spain. Imported rices from Japan is, of course, very good but they are very expensive.
D