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Southern Method of Boiling Rice

A method for cooking rice by boiling it in salted water and steaming.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and rice work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 197 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Southern Method of Boiling Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Pick over the rice carefully and rinse it well in cold water until cleansed.

Boil and steam

  1. Drain the water and put the rice in a pot of boiling water with a little salt.

  2. Boil for 17 minutes, then turn off the water, leaving a little behind.

  3. Set the pot over a few coals and let it steam for 15 minutes with the lid off.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Tea + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together197 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Its starch absorbs water and softens, so the grains swell and become tender.

The step that matters

Boil for 17 minutes, leaving a little water behind. Stopping the boil with some water still in the pot lets the rice keep absorbing moisture as it steams. Pouring off all the water would leave the grains dry and firm, while boiling too long makes them mushy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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