Skip to main content
Main

Tomato Rice

A simple rice dish cooked in tomato juice, optionally with onion, served with fried eggs and greens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Tomato Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Prepare rice as you would for apple rice.

  2. In a pot, combine rice and strained tomato juice.

  3. If desired, add an onion to the pot while cooking.

  4. Cook until rice is tender and liquid is absorbed.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried eggs and greens.

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. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Onion + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,333 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Onion and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,333 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the tomato juice as it cooks until tender.
Strained canned tomato juice
Supplies the cooking liquid and tomato flavour, with its acidity seasoning the rice.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and sweetness as it cooks in the pot with the rice.

The step that matters

Cook until rice is tender and liquid is absorbed. Rice absorbs liquid as its starch gelatinises with heat. Stopping too early leaves it firm; cooking too long can make it mushy and sticky. Checking texture rather than only time helps.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, rice, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, rice, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More tomato rice recipes

Soup 17Cheese 3 See all 37 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipes