I’ve used my rice cooker once, and really need to remember to donate it someplace. I can perfectly cook 1-3 cups of Jasmine rice in my pressure cooker in under 15 minutes. Brown rice takes about 40 minutes.
If you like how it tastes when you’re done, then you did it right.
In that situation I imagine the person would specify how fine the filtering mechanism needed to be.
I don’t sift flour, it’s a waste of time. I weigh it using a scale.
And I think you should definitely stop wasting your clearly valuable time debating this with me and immediately start writing sternly worded emails to all these manufacturers and vendors who are according to you misusing these words and putting lives in danger!
eye roll dot gif
But she wasn’t preparing a south Indian rice dish. She was attempting to prepare egg fried rice according to that specific recipe.
And, she insists that she does know “how to prepare rice”-- she was following the recipe as given.
Flour is sold in presifted varieties. That doesn’t mean that you needn’t use a scale-- just that a sifter isn’t strictly necessary. I suppose that it would make for a good even mixture of ingredients, but I’ve always found sifters hard to keep clean.
In the interview posted by @knoxblox, she explicitly states that she would not cook rice in that way at home: she would instead do it the way her mother taught her (which unfortunately she doesn’t elaborate on). She used the method in the video because she was presenting someone else’s recipe.
The subcontinent’s a big place, so I guess it could be a regular way of cooking rice somewhere there, but it doesn’t sound like it’s how they do it in the part that her family hails from.
When one’s culinary track record is as bleak as mine, it is wise to call in the big guns. And so I sheepishly explain to Vikram Sunderam, the James Beard Award-winning executive chef of Rasika, that I’m hoping he can teach me to cook, beginning with rice.
Astonishingly, he is sympathetic to my plight. His menus span all corners of the subcontinent, each dish always pitch-perfect in its distillation of the cooking traditions of its particular region. But his father is South Indian.
“Just cook it like pasta !” Sunderam insists when I meet him in the subterranean kitchen of Rasika West End. He is emphatic that I forget about the rice cooker — done and done, sir — and use what he calls the draining method, which is to boil the rice and then drain off the water when it’s done, as if it were spaghetti.
I enlist Sunderam to teach me to make one meal, a simple but common trio of vegetarian dishes: lemon rice, a vegetable stir-fry known as poriyal, and a yogurt accompaniment called pachadi. As he dices carrots and effortlessly tosses his spices in the pan, Sunderam explains the traditions that I, as a vegetarian, haven’t experienced, such as the rich seafood dishes that also hail from the southern state of Kerala as well as Tamil Nadu, which sits on the edge of the rich, blue Bay of Bengal. The never-ending train of explorers and invaders who came into India from the north centuries ago deeply influenced North Indian food, Sunderam says, but in the South, the cuisine was and still is driven by the tropical geography.
so just as Chinese cuisines are defined in the west by a particular generation of immigrants from one specific area, Indian cuisines are partially defined in the west as Bengali-- and that includes basic techniques such as how to prepare rice for the appropriate textures and flavours.
I use a lot of parboiled rice…I know the sacrilege.
agreed. I have one of those mechanical sifters that has a mesh screen in the bottom and a spring loaded handle that spins a little doohickus around to propel the flour through. it’s kicking around my kitchen and I haven’t used in over a decade since I started weighing ingredients rather than measure by volume. and a whisk works fine for blending dry ingredients and is easier to clean (and is a multitasker that is used for many other kitchen duties)
I turned to my wife immediately after we watched: “so we’re supposed to be washing the rice?”
She sheepishly admitted that her family is horrified by our lack of rice washing when they visit. I’ve never cared because I never knew better until today!
I saw in one online Japanese cooking class to use a ceramic rice cooker on the stove if you don’t have a dedicated appliance.
Here’s her 2016 video on how to make Basmati: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeaKatzTlmc
Well. I wouldn’t call that a Chicago pizza, but I would allow it as a type of pizza.
Tupperware microwave rice cooker. 20 minutes to perfect rice. 
OT here but…
Sifting is still necessary for fluffing up ingredients like flours (after measuring them by weight of course) to make better baked goods. Whisking to combine ingredients doesn’t do that.
And yes, I’ve done the tests of cakes and muffins with/without sifting. Sifting makes a noticeable difference in lightness and evenness of crumb.
Those captions are correct- I speak and read Japanese (my degree).
That…yeah. I’m sure its good- but Japanese are #1 in atrocities committed against anything resembling recognizable western (or otherwise) concepts of pizza.
I lived there 3 years. I saw a lot of corn, mayo, and nori as toppings on pizza. Japanese pizza is almost always thin crust and patheticly unfilling. Dominos in Japan exists, its closest thing to what westerners think of as pizza. It’s still not very good. Cultural fusion cuisine I am not against at all- but specifically the Japanese execution of pizza is something altogether tailored for Japanese tastes more than trying to serve something accurate to the cultures that popularized it.
Japanese cheese tastes…odd. Their camenbert is very good, but all others just taste really odd to me.
They do French pastries and bread better than most American bakeries, due to various cultural factors and historical interactions from Portuguese, and French traditions being highly admired, but their execution of “pizza”- sorry, leaves much to be desired.
There are some places that do something closer to the traditional Italian neopolitan pizza Margherita, but they are not widespread, or at least weren’t when I lived there last in 2009.
洋食, (Youshoku), is another example of this propensity- it’s a cuisine only found in Japan- and it’s hard to describe. It’s like the Japanese equivalent of American’s version of Chinese food, except with general western food. It’s a strange beast of food that’s a creation of nostalgia and cultural fusion of what western food was like post war, if I represent right. Lots of strange colored small cocktail sausages, rice plated like western food, and strange interpretations of hamburgers without buns, filled with egg, often covered in a demiglaze sauce.
It’s good- but it’s odd eating something people in another country think is a representation of your normal cuisine abroad in some way- when it’s nothing you recognize.
That’s not what sifting flour is for.
Do you live under a bridge, or are you really this lackadaisical in the kitchen?
I was thinking: hey, that looks kind of fun to try sometime, and then they had the final caption.
Nuh-uh, that is NOT Chicago pizza!
And even there, Posh English dude tries to correct her on how she pronounces Basmati. She can’t ever catch a break.
