Cooking Rice: Rinsing, Ratios, and Resting

Rinsing is about removing surface starch

You rinse rice to wash off the loose starch clinging to the grains. Left on, it glues them together.

Do not rinse until the water runs clear. Three or four gentle changes is enough; past that you are washing away aroma and surface nutrition as well. Stir through changes of water rather than scrubbing — broken grains turn the pot to porridge. The rinse is where it comes off because this pot absorbs all of its water, so whatever dissolves stays. Rice boiled in a large excess and drained gets a second chance at it after cooking — see Steaming.

One purpose, and therefore one dose

The reason above is about the grains, and the ceiling follows from it: if clinging is the only cost, three or four changes have dealt with it and everything further is aroma and surface nutrition going down the drain. Where the rice will sit in a liquid somebody looks at, the starch is a clarity problem instead — and that moves both the ceiling and the moment.

Waakye names the other purpose in its own words — "unwashed, the surface starch clouds the red liquor and the grains cling together" — two faults, and only one of them is on this page. Its step then rinses "until the water runs clear" and cites this guide for the reason while going past its number, and Plov rinses to clear as well. Both cook a long grain in something strongly flavoured that arrives from outside, so the aroma this ceiling is protecting is not what either dish is paying for.

And it need not happen before the pot. Ochazuke rinses rice that is already cooked: a pass of hot water through a sieve over cold rice "washes the sticky surface starch off and warms the rice at the same time. That single step is what keeps the liquid clear." Everything above assumes raw grain; this is the same operation on the far side of the cooking, aimed at the bowl rather than at the grains.

Where washing cannot reach it, the dish keeps the two apart instead — and both of those are already on this page without being joined to the rinse. Cazuela cooks its rice apart because "rice in the broth releases starch and dulls it", and Kongnamul gukbap never lets the grains sit long enough to shed any; that page carries the same reasoning on to the egg, half-set in its own cup because "beaten into the soup it turns the broth murky — the same insistence on clarity, applied to the egg."

Cooking noodles works the clarity rinse out at length for a noodle, and the difference is where the starch ends up. A noodle is boiled in an excess that gets poured away, so rinsing after cooking is the ordinary case there and going to clear costs nothing. This pot absorbs its water, so the rinse comes first and every extra change is taken off the grain itself. What the starch does once it is in the liquid belongs to why sauces split.

The water ratio is not a constant

• New-crop rice: already moist, so about 1 : 1 rice to water.
• Older rice: up to 1 : 1.2.
• Brown rice: 1 : 1.5 or more, and soaking is not optional.
• Stickier rice: a little more water and a longer soak.

There is a number behind why glutinous rice behaves differently. Starch is straight-chain amylose and branched amylopectin, and ordinary short-grain rice is about 17% amylose while glutinous rice is effectively 0%. Amylose is the part that recrystallises on cooling, so glutinous rice both stretches and stays soft into the next day. Daifuku and Songpyeon rest on that property — and it is also why glutinous rice is the wrong rice for fried rice.

The rice in your hand matters more than the cups in a recipe. Cook it once and adjust next time — that is the fastest route.

And every line above is a ratio of WATER

Those four sort the grain. The liquid is the other half of the equation, and several dishes here cook rice in something that is not water — where three quantities change at once, not one.

• The ratio itself, because a cup of the liquid is not a cup of water. Nasi lemak cooks its rice in coconut milk, which is roughly half to two-thirds water with the rest fat and solids. Substituted one for one it comes out underhydrated. Thin it, or use part coconut milk and part water.
• What the liquid leaves behind on the grain. Fat coats each grain and slows the water reaching its starch, so the grains stay separate instead of knitting — Banh xeo states the property for the same ingredient in a batter: "fat gets in among those starch chains and shortens them". Hainanese chicken rice uses the broth and its fat on purpose, because "that's where the flavour lives".
• And a ceiling on the heat that water does not impose. Coconut milk splits and its solids catch if it is boiled hard. Rendang is built on cooking coconut milk until it breaks; in a rice pot breaking is the failure, so it comes up once and then sits on the lowest setting.

Where the liquid is a stock the arithmetic is easier and the case is blunter. Mansaf puts it as "throwing away two hours of lamb broth and using water is throwing away half the dish", and Koshari cooks its rice in the water its lentils were boiled in, which costs nothing at all.

And the traffic runs the other way, which is a reason not to do it. Cazuela cooks its rice apart deliberately — "rice in the broth releases starch and dulls it" — because a clear broth is what that dish is. Kongnamul gukbap, below, is the same refusal taken to its limit: the rice never enters the pot at all.

Soaking is for evenness

Thirty minutes closes the moisture gap between the outside and the centre of each grain. Skip it and you get grains that are blown out at the surface and firm in the middle. Twenty minutes in summer, up to an hour in winter.

Soaked rice needs less water in the pot — subtract what it already drank.

Soaking that is not for evenness

A grain that has taken up water can be broken. Dry rice is hard, resists crushing, and heats up if you grind it. So when rice is going to become something other than rice, the purpose of the soak stops being evenness and becomes making it crushable.

• Jeonbok-juk half-crushes the soaked grains in a mortar before they go in the pot.
• Baekseolgi soaks and mills it to flour — and then steams the flour without making a dough at all.
• Masala Dosa and Khanom Chin grind soaked rice into a batter or a dough outright.

Thirty minutes for a pot of rice and thirty minutes before milling are different operations, and the second usually wants much longer.

Resting is part of the cooking

Off the heat, lid on, for ten minutes. In that time the moisture in the pot redistributes top to bottom and residual heat finishes the centre of the grains. Open it immediately and the top is wet while the bottom has caught.

After ten minutes, cut through it with a paddle from the bottom up to release the steam. Do not press and stir.

For fried rice, the rules invert

Kimchi Bokkeumbap, Egg Fried Rice, Khao Pad and Nasi Goreng fail with freshly cooked rice. It is too wet, so it clumps in the pan and never gets coated.

• Cook it 10% drier than usual.
• Spread it on a wide plate and cool it completely. Overnight in the fridge is best.
• The starch retrograding in the fridge is exactly what makes the grains separate.

Four uses for that same retrogradation

Starch recrystallising as it cools is retrogradation, and it usually just means "the rice went hard". Dishes on this site use the property in four different directions.

• To separate. Fried rice, exactly as above.
• To bind. Arancini shapes cold risotto into balls and fries them. Retrograded grain surfaces turning tacky and gripping each other is the only thing holding them, which is why warm rice will not hold however hard you press.
• To get ahead of it. Spam Musubi has to be pressed while the rice is hot, because only before retrogradation begins will it compact into one block.
• To break. Nam Khao shapes cold rice into balls, fries them, and then crushes them by hand, turning one crust into dozens of crisp fragments.

One phenomenon; when you touch it is the whole story.

When the rice is part of the dish

• Bibimbap: it has to stay loose and separate to mix with the vegetables and gochujang. Slightly less water.
• Gimbap and Onigiri: these need to hold together, so cook slightly wetter. Season with vinegar, salt and sugar (or salted water) and shape it at around body temperature.
• Paella and Risotto: do not rinse. You need the surface starch — risotto builds its creaminess from it, and paella needs grains that drink the stock and stay al dente. Risotto is stirred constantly; paella is never stirred at all.
• Dishes that use rice as cake, like Tteokguk, are a different family again — and that family inverts the amylose paragraph above. Garae-tteok is made from non-glutinous rice precisely so that it will harden as it cools, because a cake that stayed soft could not be sliced. What Daifuku and Songpyeon treat as the defect is the requirement here.
• Saleeg: the exact opposite of the paella-and-risotto line above — it washes its rice and comes out creamy anyway. Set out below.
• Kongnamul Gukbap: the rice is never cooked in the broth. Cold rice goes into the bowl, near-boiling broth is ladled over it and poured straight back into the pot, five or six times (toryeom). Each pass warms it a little, so the grains spend almost no time submerged and arrive hot while staying separate. Boil the rice in the broth and you get porridge; pour once and the middle is cold.

Rinsed, and creamy anyway

The paella-and-risotto line above reads easily as "creaminess = surface starch". Saleeg breaks that equation. It is as thick as a risotto and its rice is washed first. A long-grain indica runs high in amylose and will not shed enough amylopectin however hard you stir, so there is no creaminess there to be stirred out — it is brought in from outside instead, as milk and butter poured in once the grains have collapsed.

Stirring is not what makes a rice creamy — whether stirring can is decided by the grain, and where the grain refuses, dairy substitutes. Kabsa is the control: the same long grain aimed the opposite way, its broth measured to 1.5 times the rice and not stirred once the rice is in. One grain, two dishes, and the liquid is what separates them.

Common failures

• Caught on the bottom → heat too high or not enough water. High only until it boils, then the lowest setting.
• Undercooked on top → no resting time, or a loose lid.
• Everything sticks together → under-rinsed, or not cut through after resting.
• Porridge throughout → too much water, or grains broken while rinsing.

There is a dish that sets out to arrive at the porridge line above, by every route that line names. Jeonbok-juk uses eight times the water, crushes the soaked grains before they go in, and stirs throughout to break them further. The state listed here as a failure is that dish's objective.

So this is a list of ways rice fails as rice, not as an ingredient. The same thing is a fault or a method depending on what you set out to make.