Was going to make fried rice tonight, showed this to girlfriend- we were both laughing.
Get yourself a zojirushi rice cooker, and knuckle method is effectively 1 to 1 ratio of rice to water. I too was like wtf is this woman doing- that much water, her rice is going to be soggy as hell. Uncle Roger is a comedian- but his critique is absolutely right.
I do mine in an electric skillet- only since I don’t have a wok yet, but I do have gas stove. This woman made something closer to Asian Spanish paiella than fried rice.
Edit- Forgot to add, if cooking fresh rice for this, as I do, you need to make sure you follow that 1 to 1 ratio and stir the rice when done and leave the lid off but on heat for at least 20 minutes. This dries out the cooked rice enough to fry. The longer, the better. 1 to 1.5 hours is enough. If you don’t do this, you’ll just be making hot oily rice.
You need to rinse the rice first- even the 無洗米 (musenmai, no wash rice of Japan) needs some rinse. Uncle Roger really wasn’t joking. There are special strainers for this, Inomata makes a good one but the one on Amazon is counterfeit now (I ordered another for girlfriend and got a Chinese copy from Thailand, rather than the original Japanese Inomata brand)
I’m in the UK, and saw this go around on Facebook. 90% of comments were “this is funny, but that’s also how I make rice”. Slight track record of us not really respecting how things should be cooked, I remember growing up with ‘curry’ being a dish which always involved apples and sultanas.
My wife is Asian and the youngest of nine. She grew up routinely cooking rice for up to two dozen people.
The water ratio varies depending on the type of rice. In addition to Uncle Roger being spot on…
This point all day every day. So this led me to “get” what the BBC method was doing. Instead of the fried rice being the thing you do to get rid of the rest of it and start a new fresh pot (as there is always rice on “keep warm” in our house), they are aiming for fried rice from the get go. That requires undercooking the rice so it has a hardness that will allow for stirring and won’t stick to the pan, similar to yesterday’s rice. But it is kinda gross not to pre-rinse your rice imo. You want to flush the clouds out at least once. It does make a big difference in the fragrance.
When our fancy zojirushi cooker is occupied with regular rice and I have a craving for sticky rice, I’ll do that in the instant pot and it comes out fine (and agree, I always use the interwebs for instant pot guidance). If you already have an instant pot and don’t plan to have rice going 3x/week, I would just use the instant pot and save your $.
I’m going to try your other advice about pre-frying. This has worked really well with some bean soup recipes. We had several bottles of ghee that family brought from New Zealand, and it was amazing.
There are many currys. Not all of them consist of “prepare a dish in the usual style and add curry powder,” which is how my French and Italian cookbooks add exoticism.
I’m a dumbass white Anglo, but was lucky enough to cook with college friends who were first gen Vietnamese and Chinese Americans who used the knuckle method as a matter of course. It’s never done me wrong in the 15 years since.
Okay, but let’s not overlook that there’s more than one way in Asia, which of course has many countries and cultures, to “properly” cook any particular kind of rice.
The method of rice cooking shown in the video-lots of water, then drain it- is used for lots of middle eastern dishes where the rice is cooked further as part of another dish. It is a perfectly legitimate method of cooking rice, and Uncle Rodger should be ashamed of himself for mocking someone just because he didn’t recognize the cooking method used.
There are plenty of dishes where par-cooked rice is mixed with yogurt and an egg, then layered in a baking dish with a filling of mushroom, spinach, eggplant or any mixture thereof and then baked. If the rice was cooked in a traditional Chinese style it turns to mush as it bakes.
The whole attitude of “I don’t recognize this, so I’m going to mock it” is tacky. It’s as stupid as mocking people because of their pizza preferences. Or arguing if 5 way is really chili.
I’ve used a rice cooker at home for so many decades that I can’t cook it properly without one. In Norway I’ve used “boil in bag” rice (different from the precooked stuff I’ve seen in the US, I think it is just prewashed rice in a permeable bag) and it is idiot proof. I assume the same product is available in the UK for riceophobes.
When I moved to the UK in the '80s I was taken aback when the local Chinese take-away served their dishes with chips (instead of rice) by default. (However – to give credit where it is due – the improvement in British cuisine between then and even the late 90s was impressive.)
But “Uncle Roger” doesn’t exist. He’s a character. So I see the video as more of a gentle joke about such folks (who are often older relatives) than an actual critique of a rice-making technique.
My roommate and I learned this in college. Not the knuckle rule, because everyone learns that growing up… or so we thought. We learned that our white roommates thought that it was super weird that we’d take it for granted that everyone knew that. Funny thing though. Totally different asian heritages… (Chinese and Japanese)
Seems universal though. I dated a Vietnamese girl for a while who knew the rule.
I…yikes. The first time an Asian American friend put butter in their rice I screeched like a tea kettle in sheer horror. The sacrilege! Then little by little my soul died when I was exposed to how common this was in American culture.
Then again, I’m sure American, Asian and not, friends were secretly laughing themselves breathless when I dunked my packet of sugar into my tea… because tea was in a bag, you get the flavor without the gritty bits. Truly a novel and logical next step, yeah? Surely I’m supposed to put the bag of sugar in the water and it’ll all dissolve or the bag is porous enough for the sugar to go through it.
Yeah. No such thing. Coughs I’m still salty that no one’s really tried that to save on paper waste.
I mean, I always knew tea could be in a bag but was something that was really, really expensive. You only trotted it out to impress your guests. In America it was everywhere! Just, so convenient. (Also, I thought everyone was rich af. Whew, this was NOT the culture shock I was prepared for.)
Jesus Christ. I knew that “Uncle Roger” was making a comic video, but I didn’t have slightest intimation “Uncle Roger” was a comedian playing a character.
That’s my go-to for basmati rice, and it’s even better if you fry some spices (peppercorns, one or two cloves and cardamom pods). Great for really separate grains.
