How to Cook Rice

As well as being a staple food around the world, rice is one of my personal favourites! It’s also easy to cook, once you know how.

 

There are several different types of rice, but they all fall into short or long-grain, white or brown rice.

Short-grain rice is a short, fat, grain and tends to be stickier than long-grain rice. This is the kind of rice used for risotto, sushi, and rice pudding. It goes perfectly with all sorts of East Asian dishes.

Long-grain rice is longer and thinner, and (at least where I live) is more common than short-grain rice. It’s the perfect accompaniment to curries and chillis, and a ton of dishes from the Middle East and India.

White rice is rice that has been refined to make it easier to cook and digest. When most people think of rice, they think of white rice.

Brown rice is less refined than white rice, so it contains more fibre. Fibre is really good for you, and can help you to feel full for a long time after eating, but it does make the rice take a little longer to cook.

No matter what kind of rice you’re cooking, I find that a small cupful (200-250ml) of dry rice makes roughly three portions. Remember, it plumps up a lot during cooking!

 

Start by washing your rice. I always used to skip this step, and it’s not essential, but I find it makes the rice a little lighter and fluffier. There are a couple of different ways to wash rice. One way is to add equal parts rice and water to your saucepan, mix, and drain off the water. The method I prefer is to put my rice in a metal sieve, and rinse it under running water.

Put the rice in a saucepan and add cold water. For white rice, you need twice as much cold water as rice. You can use the same cup for rice and water, or use a measuring jug. (200ml of rice needs about 400ml of water, for example). Brown rice needs a little more water – about 20% or a quarter extra is fine. So for 200ml of brown rice, aim for a little less than 450ml of water.

Put the lid on your saucepan and bring to the boil. Once it’s reached boiling point, you can turn the pan down so that it’s just gently boiling. Rice has a tendency to want to boil over, so try and keep an eye (or an ear) on it.

Once white rice has been boiling for just 5 minutes, you can turn the saucepan off! The rice will continue to cook in the steam, and absorb all the water. (This takes about 20 minutes.) This stops you overcooking the rice, and it also saves energy!

Brown rice will need to go on gently boiling for about 20-30 minutes, or until all the water is gone. Don’t leave the pan on once it’s boiled dry though, that’s how you end up with burned rice!

 

I love rice with all sorts of dishes, especially stir-fry (link) and curry (link). It’s a really versatile grain that goes with a huge range of flavours, so it’s well worth learning to cook.

Finally, although rice is a great food, it can cause food poisoning. As I mentioned in my food safety post (link), it’s important to cool rice quickly once cooked, and only reheat it once. This is because there’s a rather special kind of microbe that can live in rice. Rather than being destroyed by cooking, it can actually be woken up from a dormant state called a spore. It can then grow if the rice is left in a warm environment. (You can find out more from the NHS here.)

How to Chop Cauliflower – into (mini) florets

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

Cauliflower is very similar in structure to (if a little denser than) broccoli, so the cutting method is almost the same. (You can find my broccoli chopping tutorial here.) And just like broccoli, cauliflower can trap a lot of water so try to avoid washing it if you can.

Cauliflower usually comes with some green outer leaves attached. You can eat these just like you can cabbage, but to get to the cauliflower itself you’ll need to remove them. You might be able to pull them off by hand, but the bigger ones tend to have rather strong stalks. To remove these, turn the cauliflower upside down and slice through the thick white stem at the base.

 

You might also sometimes find small brown spots on your cauliflower. They’re usually only in very small patches on the surface, so you can just chop off that little bit of cauliflower.

Just like with broccoli, we start by chopping cauliflower into florets. Remember, work from the outside in, hold the cauliflower by the stalk, and chop downwards.

To turn each floret into mini florets, it’s simply a matter of repeating this process on a smaller scale. Aim for mini florets about 1-2cm (½-1 inch) in size. It’s even easier to do this with the top of the cauliflower – it basically comes off in mini florets anyway!

You can also use the stalk of the cauliflower – just chop it into cubes about 1cm (¾ inch) square.

Cauliflower has a mild, almost creamy, flavour, but it can also absorb a lot of flavour from herbs and spices. This makes it perfect for one-pot dishes with a rich sauce. It takes about 15 minutes to boil.

Cauliflower is also great roasted! If you chop it into full-size florets, you can add it to oven-cooked dishes like pot roast (link) or casserole (link). Just add it halfway through with the other soft vegetables like parsnip (link) and sweet potato (link).

How to Chop a Carrot – diced carrot

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

Oh look, it’s carrots again! This tutorial is for diced carrot, which is perfect when you want all the flavours in the dish to mix together.

Just like before, start by making sure your carrots are clean and chopping out any discolouration or blemishes.

Next, cut off the top and bottom (or ‘top and tail’) of your carrots.

The next step is to chop each carrot into chunks that are easier to handle, and are a roughly consistent width along their length. You can then deal with each chunk in turn.

 

 

 

 

 

Start by chopping each chunk into long slices about 1cm (half an inch) wide. Depending on the size of the carrot, this could be thirds, halves or quarters.

 

 

 

Continue to cut the chunks into sticks, about 1cm (½ inch) wide. (A little larger than in last month’s tutorial for carrot sticks (link).) If you can, try and avoid breaking them apart for now.

Finally, cut in the other direction, to make little cubes of carrot about 1cm (½ inch) square.

If you’re really looking to save time, you could even try chopping more than one layer of sticks at once! I’d recommend starting with just one and working your way up though.

 

Diced carrot cooks a little faster than slices or sticks, but still takes about 15 minutes to boil, especially if you’re cooking it in a sauce.

How to Chop an Onion – 2 Ways to Dice an Onion

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link) Please remember to give onions special consideration because of their shape, texture, and tendency to make your eyes water!

We’ve been gradually reducing the size of our onions – going from onion chunks (link), to onion slices (link), and now diced onion! Dicing onions is a great way to get a lot of flavour out of them in a short cooking time.

This tutorial contains two different methods to dice an onion. The first method is simpler, but it does take a little time. The second is so fast your eyes barely have time to water, but it is a more advanced technique.

Method 1

Start by chopping your onion into slices. Just follow the tutorial from last month (link), although you can skip cutting the onion into quarters and just slice the halves.

Once you have your slices, lay them down to dice. I like to cut a sort of lazy grid pattern, but you could also cut it into triangles (sort of like a mini pizza; see picture below).

To save time, you can cut through multiple slices at once. I would recommend you start with just one and work your way up slowly to find how many slices you’re comfortable chopping at once. Make sure if you’re stacking slices that you have the largest one on the bottom and the smallest on the top – it’s important that your stack doesn’t fall over during cutting.

 

Method 2

I actually learned this second technique from the anime sweetness & lightning. It’s a little tricky, because it involves breaking my second rule of knife safety (see my earlier post here). But it’s so much faster that I’ve diced onions this way ever since.

To start, remove the skin and top of the onion, but leave the root end on. (This will help the onion stay together as you chop it.) Cut the onion in half.

Next, cut into the onion towards the root end. You don’t need to cut all the way through, but you’ll need to use your non-knife hand to steady the onion.

Now cut downwards. You don’t need to cut right to the edges, because of the layers in the onion. I usually find just three cuts is plenty.

Finally, cut as if you were slicing the onion. Perfectly diced pieces of onion will simply fall off the end!

As you get towards the end of the onion, you may find that it starts to fall apart a bit. Hold it together if you can, but you can always deal with those parts that do fall off separately.

This technique definitely takes a bit of getting used to, but if you can master it it’s so worth it!

 

Diced onions can be used to add flavour to a huge variety of dishes, including stews, soups, and curries. They’re especially great in dishes where you want a little bit of everything in every spoonful.

You can fry diced onions in about 15-25 minutes, although it rather depends on how soft you like your onions! Onions can be eaten raw, or very well-done, so it’s really a matter of taste.

How to Chop a Bell Pepper – into strips

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

 

 

Bell peppers are actually a fruit, but they’re great in savoury dishes. Like carrots, you can eat them both raw and cooked, so you can use them in dishes from salads to stir-fries.

 

You can wash bell peppers if you want, but they have a natural waxy coating that helps to protect them while they’re growing.

 

 

The easiest way to start chopping a bell pepper is by cutting it in half. Bell peppers have smooth, shiny skin, so to prevent your knife from slipping place it in one of the grooves of the pepper. Then cut straight down. (You may also see a small black stick at the base of the pepper – this is just part of the old flower; you can pull it off with your fingers.)

Cut each half in half again, so you can get to the pith – the white parts of the flesh. The pith is edible, but it has a bitter taste so most people prefer to remove it. The pith is found mostly at the top and joins of the pepper, and is easiest to cut out where it joins to the brightly coloured flesh.

Now you’re ready to cut your pepper into strips. Start by cutting each quarter in half from side to side. (You can skip this step if you want, but I find that it’s easier to get even-sized strips when you deal with the top and bottom halves separately.) Then take each of these chunks and cut off strips about 1cm (½ inch) wide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can eat bell peppers raw, or lightly fried. (If you cook them for longer than about 15 minutes they tend to get a bit soggy and fall to pieces.) Bell peppers also work well in rich, tomatoey sauces where they add a hint of sweetness!

Bell peppers don’t last long once they’ve been cut, so it’s best to use them within a day or two. If parts of the pepper are squishy, it often means it’s already started to break down. Cut out these squishy bits and discard them – I find it easiest to do this right at the end.

How to Chop a Carrot – into sticks

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

We’ve already done a few How to Chop a Carrot tutorials, but carrots really do feature in almost every meal I cook, so bear with me! They’re also a great vegetable to practice on, because they’re inexpensive and can be eaten both raw and cooked. In today’s tutorial we’ll be making carrot sticks.

The first few steps are the same as we’ve learned so far. Wash your carrot with clean water (and a scrubbing brush if you want), but try and leave the skin on to preserve the mineral content.

Check your carrots over for any discolouration or blemishes that you want to cut out. Just like before, cut them out using a small ‘V’ shape.

Chop off the top and bottom (or top and tail) of your carrots.

Next, cut the carrot into chunks the same length as the sticks you want to end up with. I usually aim for about 4-5cm or so (a little under 2 inches).

 

 

 

 

With each chunk, start by chopping it in half. This gives you a flat surface to rest the carrot on, which makes the rest of the chopping safer. There are a couple of different ways to go from here.

 

 

 

 

The way I always used to make carrot sticks is to just keep halving until you end up with sticks that are about half a centimetre (¼ inch) at the fat end.

Recently I’ve found, however, that it’s more efficient to cut carrot sticks using a kind of grid pattern. Slice each chunk into four lengthwise, then cut each thick slice into sticks. You can even stack your slices to make chopping faster!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not only are sticks great finger food, you can also boil them like slices (link). However, my favourite way to cook carrot sticks is in a stir-fry, which is the recipe we’re working towards this month!

How to Chop an Onion – into slices

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link) Please remember to give onions special consideration because of their shape, texture, and tendency to make your eyes water!

The chunks of onion from our previous tutorial (link) are great for slow-cooking, but if you want fried onions then I like slices best.

 

 

 

 

Just like before, we want to take off the skin, top and bottom from the onion. You can start in the exact same way – chop off the root and the top of the onion, making sure to keep your fingers out of the way.

(For slices, you might actually want to leave the root end on for now – try it both ways and see which you prefer!)

 

 

Once you have a flat surface at one end of the ball, you can rest it there to cut downwards, slicing your onion in half. Then deal with each half in turn, starting with a cut right down the middle.

When you’re chopping onions, it’s a lot easier and quicker to work with if all the layers stay stuck together. So, when you’re slicing, work from the thin end(s) into the middle. And if you need to turn the onion around to get to the other end with your dominant hand, try turning the chopping board instead.

 

 

 

Although very thin slices of onion are so impressive (I’ve always loved watching chefs cut off super thin slices at top speed!), slices about half a centimeter (1/4 of an inch) thick are great for everyday cooking.

 

 

 

 

These onion slices take about 15-25 minutes to fry, although it depends how soft you like your onions! Onions can be eaten raw, or very well-done, so it’s really a matter of taste. They’re a great accompaniment to fried meats like sausages or burgers, or (my personal favourite) fish. And they’re a great source of flavour in a stir-fry, which we’re working towards this month!

How to Oven-Bake Fish

Fish is a great source of protein and essential oils. It’s also fairly easy to tell when it’s cooked – the flesh goes from being translucent (mostly see-through) to opaque.

Fish is one of my favourite foods, but it can be dry and tough when over-cooked. That’s why I like this technique; it gently steams the fish and gives you a bit of leeway in cooking times. The fancy name for this technique is cooking en papillote, which is just French for in parchment. I usually use foil though.

You will need:

• aluminium foil
• a baking tray
• an oven
• oven gloves

and the ingredients:

• 1 fillet of fish per person
• a little lemon juice
• a pinch of salt

Start by turning on your oven to Gas Mark 4, 180° (160° fan).

Cut pieces of aluminium foil to size. It needs to be big enough to go around your fillet; I find that a square about half the width of the roll fits most pieces of fish.

Put your fish in the middle of the foil, and add a little sprinkle of lemon juice and salt.

Fold the foil up around the edges of the fish, leaving space around the edges and sides, and roughly pinch it together at the top. The aim here is to make a little fish parcel that can fill up with steam, but it needs to let some of the steam escape so that it doesn’t burst.

 

 

Place your foil parcel(s) on a baking tray and bake in the oven. Oily fish like salmon will take 20-25 minutes, while white fish like cod take only 10-15 minutes to cook.

 

After the cooking time has passed, open the fish parcel and check that the fish is cooked through. (Be careful – it’s hot!)

 

Sweet potato wedges and a rainbow of vegetables are delicious with fish!

You can try out a lot of different flavours in these little fish parcels, which makes them really versatile! Why not try adding some herbs like parsley or lemongrass, or spice it up with a pinch of chilli. You could also replace the lemon juice with vinegar for a different twist.

Remember to wash up and then reuse or recycle your aluminium foil!

How to Chop Broccoli – into florets

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

I think a lot of people have a bit of a love/hate relationship with green vegetables, but broccoli is a firm favourite of mine. Broccoli is an interesting vegetable because it’s actually the flowers of the broccoli plant!

If you can, try not to wash your broccoli. A lot of water can get trapped between the flowers, which can make it rather soggy to eat.

Broccoli is sold in ‘heads’, and the individual ‘branches’ are called florets (see the picture below). In this tutorial I’ll teach you how to cut and cook the florets.

The grey circle indicates one floret

For cutting, it’s easiest to work from the outside in. Hold the broccoli so that the floret you want is as close as possible to the chopping board. (I like to hold the stalk with my left hand as I cut with my right.) Slide your knife between the floret and the stalk, and chop downwards.

Carry on chopping, working from the outside in, until you have enough broccoli. (Depending on the size of the florets, I usually allow 1-3 florets per person.) The very top of the broccoli can be a little tricky because the florets become less clearly defined. Just try and cut it into pieces about the same size as the florets you’ve already chopped.

 

 

 

 

It’s a really common mistake for people to overcook broccoli; one of the reasons is that the stalk cooks more slowly than the flowers. To combat this, place the broccoli florets upside down and cut about halfway down the stem. Try and make sure all the pieces of stem are smaller than about ½cm (quarter of an inch).

 

 

Broccoli only takes about five minutes to cook, whether you’re boiling, microwaving, or steaming. (If you’re boiling or steaming, place the florets with the stalks at the bottom.) Once cooked, broccoli turns a slightly brighter colour than when it’s raw. It also looks a little shinier! And just like carrots and potatoes, cooked broccoli is soft enough to easily poke a fork into.

How to Chop a Carrot – into slices

Happy New Year, and a special welcome to anyone joining How to Chop a Carrot in the wake of New Year’s resolutions!

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

Carrots were almost always part of a hot meal when I was growing up. I’ve already made a tutorial for carrot chunks (here), but slices of carrot cook much quicker!

First, take a carrot. You don’t need to peel it (a lot of the minerals are right underneath the skin), but you might want to wash it. Use clean water to wash off things like soil, and if you want to be a bit more thorough you can scrub you carrots with a clean washing-up brush.

Next, check your carrots over for any discolouration or blemishes. These aren’t dangerous, they just don’t taste or look very good. If they are on the end of the carrot, you can just cut the end off. If they’re in the middle of the carrot, first place the carrot flat on a chopping board or plate with the blemish facing upwards. Then make a small cut either side of the blemish, making a small ‘V’ (see picture).

We also don’t want to eat the very top or bottom of the carrot. (These are often known as the top and tail – to top and tail your carrots means to chop the top and bottom off.) Leave the top of the carrot on for now – it’s useful to hold on to while you’re cutting slices.

 

Next cut slices about half a centimetre (¼ inch) thick, working up the carrot from the tail. Don’t worry if your slices vary a little in size.

Carrot slices can be eaten raw in salads, but I usually eat them boiled. Place your carrot slices in a saucepan and add enough water to just about cover them. Heat on the hob until they start to boil, then turn down the heat a little and keep them boiling gently for about 20 minutes. Once cooked, carrots should be soft enough to easily poke a fork into. Just try not to boil them to death – you’ll lose all those lovely vitamins.