How to Cook Rice without a Rice Cooker

How to cook rice without a rice cooker and get perfect steamed rice every time!

Steamed Rice

I have to thank Kylie Kwong for teaching me the simplest and never fail way to perfectly cook steamed rice every time.  Using just a simple saucepan.  You can see her original recipe in her book  ‘Simple Chinese Cooking Class‘.  She also has a heap of great pickled veggies recipes, love love love her pickled fennel!  Amazing on a cheese board with blue cheese!  Anyway, a bit off topic there.  There is not much I need to say about this, other than it’s a really great recipe to have in your set and to be able to serve up perfect, fluffy rice every time in less than 30 minutes.

I have always treated rice as a sometimes food, knowing it as having very little, if any health benefits to our diet.  Recently however I have been doing some research on the benefit of ‘Resistance Starches’ and eating rice cooked, then cooled, turns it into a resistant starch.  To try and explain the benefits of this we can start by talking about probiotics, as everyone knows the goodness of probiotics in our systems.  Probiotics are live bacteria we can include in our diet through food to help with our gut health.  As they are living organisms, they need to be nourished and this is where prebiotics come in.  Prebiotics are indigestible substances that pass through our gastrointestinal tract, essentially being sugars and fibres.  Prebiotics promote the growth of good bacteria in our lower bowel.  Resistant starch functions kind of like soluble fibre.  Resistant starch is formed when some starchy foods, such as potatoes and rice, are cooked and then cooled. The cooling turns some of the digestible starches into resistant starches.  So this is kind of like the good news story, your leftovers are good for you!