Cook Like a Local by Chris Shepherd & Kaitlyn Goalen

Author:Chris Shepherd & Kaitlyn Goalen [Shepherd, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

But I never really thought of rice as a staple for me until I took my first kitchen job, at a sushi restaurant. Every day, I’d walk into the restaurant to start my shift in the dish pit, and the air would be filled with the smell of steamed rice. The rice cooker was always on, keeping perfectly cooked grains fluffy and warm. Every day, before we’d open for service, one of the cooks would prepare a meal for the staff, and it always included rice…rice with Japanese curry and eggs, rice with teriyaki chicken, fried rice with vegetables. I began to look forward to my daily bowl of rice, sometimes with nothing but a splash of soy sauce as seasoning. It was as satisfying and delicious at 8 a.m. as it was at 11 p.m.

I grew to love it more than pasta, more than bread. Just thinking about a bowl of rice topped with rich curry or creamy korma or spicy mapo tofu makes me hungry.

But rice isn’t only a checkmark in your “carb” box. What I’ve learned over the years through eating different styles of food and seeing how my friends cook is that rice is a star player. Even basic steamed rice is incredibly versatile: you can season it with vinegar for sushi, stir-fry it, bake it into a casserole, or add it to a batter for doughnuts. I love the various methods to make rice crispy. I learned from my friends Lawrence and Noi Allen, former owners of Asia Market, about the Thai version of this technique, in which you season cooked rice with curry and sausage, form it into balls, and briefly deep-fry it until crisp on the outside. Persian rice also features this contrast between crispy and soft, but the technique to get there is pretty different. It’s all about slow, steady, patient cooking on top of a stove to create the elusive crispy bottom crust.

The flip side of crispy is “so soft that you need a spoon,” and rice can do this beautifully, too. Just think about rice pudding or risotto, and go beyond the spoon into sipping territory with rice-based drinks like horchata.

And if your head is spinning at all the ways you can cook rice, it’ll really explode when you start to consider all the types of rice and the rice-based products at your disposal. Rice noodles, rice paper, rice flour. Rice can do it all. Like Beyoncé (#houstonpride).

Honestly, it can be overwhelming, and I’m not ashamed to admit that even after all these years, rice can still intimidate me. I’ve been cooking professionally for more than two decades, but I still know that rice is the boss of me and not the other way around. The only way to get more confident in cooking rice? Experiment with cooking it as many ways as possible.

If that sounds like a commitment, let me lay out my pitch. For starters, it’s delicious. Make the Louisiana Seafood Rice Casserole (this page) or Noi’s Thai Fried Rice Balls (this page) and try to tell me otherwise.

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