This rice has given up
Soupy rice with salmon and dill
Here at 40 Ingredients Forever, recipes are abundant in joy yet streamlined in process—because they’re all made of the same 40 ingredients.
Screwing up rice is humiliating. You’d think it’d be straightforward to cook — what with the billions of people who eat it every day — and yet it’s too easy to make soggy and crunchy, totally sad, rice. At least for me.
After enough failed pots in college, I shied away from making it altogether (and also never sprang for a rice cooker). But then, over a decade later, Ryan bought a 5-pound bag of rice as the world was shutting down in 2020. What was I gonna do with that?
When I didn’t feel like second-guessing my rinsing (is this still too cloudy?), following commands — NO peeking, for exactly 17 minutes — and failing yet another recipe promising perfectly steamed rice, I would simmer it like pasta in a big pot of salted water, which I learned from Christina Chaey and Abra Berens (and wrote about this week for the NYT).
Another option: Give up. Cook the rice past tender until the grains burst and give up their starches to the surrounding liquid. There are many porridges that are cozy and creamy because of it, including congee, jook, arroz caldo, and risotto.
Today’s recipe is silky from busted rice and verdant with softened fennel and dill. When the soup is about ready, lay thin strips of salmon on top. In a couple minutes, the fish will be tender enough to flake with a press of your spoon.
Every cook comes to the kitchen with a crew of limitations, usually some combination of knowledge, enthusiasm, focus, time, tools, ingredients, and self-confidence. Cooking is about how you work with and around those challenges to make what you feel like eating. You don’t need to know how to do everything to make a good dinner. Turns out you don’t even know how to steam rice.1
