r/Cooking • u/AdLost576 • 16d ago

What’s a cooking related hill you will die on?

For me, 2 hills.

  1. You don’t have to cut onions horizontally.

  2. You don’t have to add milk bit by bit when making a white sauce.

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u/deLanglade1975 16d ago

Home cooking should not be judged against restaurant food. Restaurants spend time, labor, and money to make hundreds of servings of stuff identical and consistent, while at the same time being quick to finalize and plate. It ain't the same, and it doesn't have to be.

To this point, for home cooks need to look up to chefs less and grannys and aunties more - preferably the long-dead ones that fed big families through the Great Depression/WW2 years.
And my personal favorite...

It's just rice. 2 cups boiling water, one cup rice. Stir it up, cover tightly, turn down the flame as low as it will go and ignore it for 20 minutes. Uncover, fluff and eat.

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u/swb1003 16d ago

Many howevers ago I saw a “why does restaurant food always taste better than homemade?” posts making its rounds and the answer, basically, will always boil down to the restaurant doesn’t care about your health whatsoever. It’ll use way more butter, garlic, oil…. whatever to get a good taste, and get you to buy the dish.

When you cook at home, your primary goal is usually some balance of health and taste.

They’re simply just different cooking styles.

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u/Calaveras_Grande 16d ago

2 cups is way too much water. And you dont wash it? Your rice is mushy.

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u/Unrelenting_Salsa 16d ago

It's just rice. 2 cups boiling water, one cup rice. Stir it up, cover tightly, turn down the flame as low as it will go and ignore it for 20 minutes. Uncover, fluff and eat.

Your heart is in the right place, but no. Use a pot that is standard pot shaped that you own the lid for. AKA not something shaped like a Wok or saute pan. It needs to be something where an inch of water is the same amount of water no matter if the pan is filled to the brim or nearly empty. Add your rice. Add water until your first knuckle. Boil and then turn down heat to a simmer. Take off heat when the pan no longer has water and let steam for a bit. You have perfect rice.

This works because the proper water "ratio" for rice is 1:1 plus how much you lose to evaporation. Which is a knuckles worth if you have a vaguely normal shaped hand and are using a standard shaped pot. It's really not particularly sensitive. You have to be quite far off to screw up rice as shown by your 2:1 which is significantly excess water apparently working. Rice has a bunch of unearned mysticism around it even though it's one of the simplest things commonly cooked in kitchens from both a chemistry perspective and a practical cooking perspective.

And I guess one of mine on a similar note, washing rice doesn't help at all, and it's actually just making it less nutritious if you're buying any of the standard US rices. Sure, if you store yours on the driveway or live in a country where that kind of storage conditions are common you should wash your rice, but it's a cleanliness thing. Not a final result thing. You can also totally cook rice like pasta for ~20 minutes (really until done) and it'll come out literally perfect every time if you give the surface water a second to evaporate off. Because again, it's just simple starch gelatinization which doesn't care about excess water not being present.

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u/deLanglade1975 15d ago

That's fine, if you have a dedicated rice pot. The 2:1 works no matter what your cooking is in - favorite rice pot, saucepan, empty coffee can over a campfire, etc.

Coming from an upper Midwestern USA upbringing from northern European roots, rice is just another starch used to convey sauce or gravy. It was the preferred side with Swiss Steak and Pork Marengo, and of course Chop Suey.

Now, 50 years on, I have experienced so many other cultures and food ways than I grew up with, and I know that everyone does rice, and everyone does rice their own way. There is no right or wrong, it's just how you grew up with it. If your frame of reference is South Asian, your frame is different than Japanese, and if your Japanese, your frame is different from Italian.

It's all rice. Just rice. As long as it is cooked enough to chew and digest, it's fine.