Sev­eral people have expressed to me over the past few years the dif­fi­culty in cooking rice. This sur­prised me a bit until Monica and I moved into this apart­ment and imme­di­ately started having prob­lems. My issue is heat con­trol. The burners on our stove run very hot. Low tem­per­a­ture is high enough to cause a sim­mering product to boil over or burn.

Rice seems like the most simple thing. How­ever, as with most simple things, it can be the most dif­fi­cult part of a meal. Since it’s the starch base for many more com­pli­cated dishes, it’s also the thing that, done wrong, can make a good meal go bad.

I guess people who have a rice cooker don’t have this problem. Monica owns a rice cooker that she some­times uses. It’s old and and a little clunky and the direc­tions for use are either missing or written entirely in Chi­nese, so I cannot use it. Monica tried to instruct me once but, like mar­tial arts or shooting hoops, it’s some­thing you can only explain to a point. After that, you just have to go on feel.

The solu­tion I’ve dis­cov­ered for making great rice without a rice cooker is inspired by Michael Ruhlman’s tech­nique for making chicken stock at home. When making stock, you need to cook the bones in liquid at a very very low simmer for a longer period of time. This can be tricky on the stove top (espe­cially one like mine) but can be very easily done in the oven. You just need a pot that can be heated safely in the oven (as in, the han­dles won’t become dan­ger­ously hot or melt off). Thanks to my par­ents, I am the proud owner of some really old school stain­less steel cook­ware. It’s about as sexy as Martha Stewart but can be used to cook any­thing, fashion arrow­heads from stone,  crack open coconuts, and beat back an angry hoard of vikings.

If you have that, the rice cooking pro­tocol is simple. You need about between 1.5 and 1.75 cups of water per cup of rice (more for brown, less for white). I will season my rice with salt or ginger or cilantro and occa­sion­ally add some oil to the water). Put every­thing in your pot and bring it up to a boil. While waiting for the boil, pre­heat your oven to between 210 and 220 degrees. Once your water boils, turn off the stove and stick the pot (cov­ered) in the oven. Set a timer for 20 to 30 min­utes (more for brown rice, less for white rice). When it’s done, take it out (care­fully) and check it. Some­times I ‘finish’ the rice on the stove top if it’s still a bit wet.

Tonight we enjoyed brown rice with Monica’s MaPo Tofu. Soooooo good. And even though I didn’t employ any spe­cial equip­ment, the rice was perfect.