By Chef Si
In life you could eat rice for 50 years, learned different kind of rice cooking, western way of preparing parboiled rice, Indian way of cooking pilaf rice, Persian way of cooking Saffron rice (parboiled than steamed, my Persian friend used to laugh at Chinese's broken steamed rice) and Chinese way of steaming rice (add water, boil then simmer). Then one day you suddenly got an awakening and turned into a fussiest rice connoisseur. You really thought the traditional way of steaming rice sucks, you began to fuss that the upper part of the rice was either nice or too dry but the bottom part of the rice was always either a bit softer than the top or it could be soggy. You told yourself that you are not going to tolerate this kind of inconsistent rice produced in the same pot. so you told yourself that you must either change it or change yourself for the better!
I really think that any types of rice cooker have turned many people into the worst and laziest "rice cook"! I remember many years ago, my sister and I went on a trip, but there was no rice cooker in the service apartment, and my sister looked at me and I looked at her, we asked each other, "Who is going to cook the rice with a pot?" And she said she had not used a pot to cook rice more than 30 years, and I told her I had not used a pot to cook rice for more than 10 years. So at the end I had to cook the rice, it turned out very well, like most Chinese, I used to pay more attention to the rice quality rather than cooked rice texture.
Actually, the most traditional way of bamboo steamer could produce the best and most consistent evenly steamed rice, and it also could produce a nice aromatic rice, but obviously, it's considered as an out-of-date method of cooking. It also denotes that modern age people rather dropped their standard of eating good texture rice for a convenience sake.
Another method of producing good rice is using a pressure cooker to cook your rice, the pressure could make the rice cooked evenly, and the texture is simply awesome.
Lastly, I don't have a pressure cooker, I do have a bamboo steamer with big holes, that means that if I cook rice, I need to wash both the bamboo steamer and a piece of cheese/cotton cloth, honestly I hate to wash the sticky cloth, but I do have a cheesecake springform pan, I thought why not? Very soon, I found out it is also a magic pan for cooking A+ sweet rice for brewing rice, A+ sushi rice for sushi, onigiri or nigiri, you can cook your Basmati rice faster, pilaf rice in a shorter time, even if you have a hopeless chef who always messed up your rice that was good enough only to turn into pudding, now after he uses this magic springform pan, he can cook a perfect rice. From now on, there is no myth that only Japanese, Chinese or Korean arguably could cook the best rice on earth.
Soak your sweet rice, Basmati rice, Thai rice, Sushi rice to opaque, usually 2 to 4 hours or more (for Korean). In a larger pot, add water and a raised stainless steel rack, make sure the water is added parallel to the top part of the rack. Rinse your soaked rice inside springform pan until the water runs clear. Place the springform pan with rice on top of the rack. You would notice there is no water inside the rice.
Soaked the rice until opaque before you steam the rice, no need to add any water, you just need to rinse the rice, make sure you have a raised stainless steel rack at the bottom of the steamer pot, the water must be added parallel to the rack, and make sure the water is enough to last for 30 minutes under fire.
However, you don't need to worry much, if you have a very heavy lip, you can cook the rice faster, but if you have a lighter lip you will take 5 extra minutes to cook the rice. After you put the springform pan on the rack, you turn on the fire to high. Steam the sushi or sweet rice (if more than 400g of rice) for 25 minutes for heavy lip and 30 minutes for lighter lip, whereas Basmati rice will take the shortest time as it is the long grain rice, it may vary from 10 to 20 minutes depends on how much rice you cook and how big is your pot and how high you turn on your fire. One thing about this rice is, even if you cook an extra 5 minutes, it won't turn too soft. As long as your water doesn't dry up in the pot, you won't cause a havoc.
Why this method of rice cooking could give you consistent good texture rice? When you steam the rice, the uncooked rice would absorb whatever water it needed from the vapor, if there is any excess, it will leak through the springform pan base, thus the rice used the springform pan to steam will produce a very even consistent rice with perfect texture, every grain was perfectly cooked from the top to the bottom of the pan, not too dry and not too soft, it absorbed whatever required water from its surrounding during steaming process and the water wouldn't be collected and retained at the base of the pan during steaming process.
Whereas for the rice cooker due to water from the steam would drip and collect at the bottom part of the rice cooker due to there is no outlet to drain this excess water, thus the bottom part of the cooked rice would be always soggier than the upper part of the cooked rice.
Last night, I tried to show my rice steaming method with the springform pan to my visiting friend from Beijing, she thought that I would end up producing a pot of uncooked rice, but after 25 minutes she was so impressed of the cooked rice and its shiny texture on each grain. This method is not much different from bamboo steaming method, the excess water would leak through the cloth and the holes of the bamboo steamer and the rice would take whatever moisture it required during the steaming process.
We compared the sushi rice cooked with the rice cooker and sushi rice steamed with the springform pan, the sushi rice steamed with the springform pan not only got the perfect rice texture, it also tasted much sweeter. When you used a non-stick springform pan to steam the rice, it's so easy to wash and not a single grain of your rice was wasted as well.
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