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Rice in a restaurant tastes much better than rice at home and it has everything to do with water

restaurant
This is how you prepare rice as if it came straight from a restaurant!

Cooking rice seems like the easiest job in the world: boil some water, add the rice, and boil again. Yet this seemingly simple process often results in a dry, hard, mushy, or sloppy mess. How can it be that rice always tastes so much better in a restaurant?

This is how you prepare restaurant-worthy rice.

Rinsing and soaking

First, you need to rinse the rice grains to remove the excess starch. That’s because this starch can make your grains too sticky when you cook them. Rinse the grains for as long as it takes before the water is clear. If you use brown rice, basmati, jasmine or texmati rice, you need to soak the grains for an additional 30 minutes up to an hour.

Amount of water

This is where a lot of people go wrong when they’re cooking rice. Even when you’re meticulously following the instructions on the packaging, your rice doesn’t taste as you’d expected. For white rice, you need 360 to 420 ml of water per 175 grams of rice. It’s different for brown rice, though: for brown rice you need 480 ml of water per 175 grams of rice.

Pot

Just when you thought your preparation was done, there’s another thing to keep in mind: you need to use the right pot. Use a pot with a thick base, as the bottom will make sure the heat is distributed evenly. If you’re using a pot with a thin base, the middle will cook quicker than the sides of the pot.

Now you’ve done all the preparations for making rice, it’s time to learn how to actually cook it. Go on to the next page to find out how!

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