To hear the cook, writer and teacher Sonoko Sakai tell it, “1955 is the year my mother was liberated.” Several things happened that year: Sakai was born, but more liberating still for her mother? The birth of the first home rice cooker as we know it (automatic, electric).
Recipe: Basic White Rice
The son of a similarly “liberated” Korean woman, I was raised on rice-cooker rice, the chirping bells and whistles of the cooker signaling dinnertime. Both elemental and overlooked, rice was the main starch in our house, one of the first things I learned to cook as a child, but it wasn’t until I started making it on the stovetop that I really understood how it cooks, and how much better it could taste. I’m convinced that it’s the fire under the pot that produces a flavor worth striving for, something a rice cooker can’t achieve. Eating a bowl of perfect stovetop white rice — or at least rice that’s more perfect than you’ve ever had it — is like wearing glasses for the first time. Everything comes into focus: grains that are shiny, fluffy and tender, yet somehow still individual, sticky and standing. Grains that are ready to take flight, the dandelion fuzz of carbohydrates.
Sakai’s recipe, from her latest cookbook, “Wafu Cooking,” confirmed for me that you don’t need a fancy rice cooker to make brilliant rice. “All you need,” she said to me reassuringly over the phone, “is a saucepan with a heavy bottom and lid.” The rest is technique: a brief rinse (no need to wait for the water to run clear), a longer soak, a shorter cook and two separate but successive rests — before and after the rice is fluffed. “Don’t mash it,” Sakai said of the fluffing stage. “It’s like a pillow.” Note that most of this time is inactive. I say this before I tell you: It takes one hour to make flawless white rice.
Few recipes change my mind about the fundamentals of my own cooking. But as Sakai said, “Rice is sacred.” Her recipe, which considers each grain, taught me that the best way to cook rice is to first understand the crop. Grains grown in water can take on water. You can’t really oversoak them, she said, because they take the water they need and leave the rest. That’s why Japanese home cooks rinse and soak their rice overnight: to speed up the process for the morning, when rice is served with leftovers from the night before — a fish, an egg, a soup, a vegetable. I love Sakai’s rice topped with tuna mayo or crispy bacon and mirin-basted eggs. Dal and rice, a complete protein, is a regular staple on my table. Have you ever seasoned fresh sushi rice with a little salt, sugar and rice vinegar? Wrap scoops of that with crisp sheets of nori, maybe even sneak a sliver of avocado or crab in there, and relish in your own makeshift California rolls. Did you even know that you could do that, that you could build a life around rice?
One of the best Christmas gifts I ever received was a bag of Hokkaido Nanatsuboshi white rice from my friend Junnan. According to the bag, it was milled just days earlier. I had never eaten rice that fresh before. I made a pot one night, and again another night, and a few times more until all of it was gone, and I was sad. The gift of rice that fresh — good rice — is worth more than a Wagyu steak or a diamond engagement ring in my book. And it’s not that you need just-milled heritage rice flown in from Japan to enjoy that wealth: Whatever medium- or short-grain rice you can find at the store works. If you can maximize its character — individual grains that each want to be loved, celebrated and steamed until soft — a world of quiet, everyday joy may open up for you.
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