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Boiled Rice

Rice cooked by boiling and steaming, finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice in three changes of cold water.

Boil

  1. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil.

  2. Slowly add the rice to the boiling water without stopping the boil.

  3. Boil the rice hard for 25 minutes without stirring.

  4. Drain the rice in a colander and rinse with cold water.

Steam and serve

  1. Place the colander over a pot of boiling water.

  2. Cover the rice with a plate and steam for at least 2 hours.

  3. Serve the rice in a covered dish with a lump of butter.

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. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 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
Forms the main body of the dish, absorbing water and softening as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the cooked rice a smooth mouthfeel and flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the rice hard without stirring. A rolling boil keeps the water agitated and the grains moving freely, so they cook evenly. Stirring can break the grains and release starch, making the rice gummy.

“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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