Easy Rules to Follow for Cooking Rice
In theory, cooking rice may seem like an easy task. After all, all you have to do is add some water and wait for the rice to boil, right? Well, not exactly. In fact, there are so many things that could go wrong with cooking rice that even experienced chefs may have a problem with it from time to time. Among the most common rice disasters that you can encounter are that the rice will turn out either too soft, too hard, too bland or too sticky. But if you follow these simple rules, you can avoid these problems and come up with rice that is perfectly cooked.
Different Types of Rice
Before you even try to cook rice, it would be good to know a few things about this particular food first. Rice grains comes in many forms, shapes, tastes, colors and sizes. Among the healthiest varieties is brown rice, which has a very low calorie content but contains a lot of fiber. Rice is a great addition to any meal. It can fill you up just as well as any pasta, but it doesn’t come with as many carbohydrates and starch, which is why many people consider it to be the healthier alternative.
How to Cook Rice the Right Way
As mentioned, there are so many possible undesirable outcomes when it comes to cooking rice, but with the following tips, there is no way that you can go wrong. One of the easiest methods you can use is to buy the specially-packed partially-cooked rice. Just place the bag in a pot of water and boil for 10 minutes and presto — you have a bowl of ready-to-serve rice. However, this option is not really practical, unless you are very busy and have no time to do it the ordinary way. First of all, it’s quite expensive to be doing this every time you need rice. Second, many capable cooks feel that this method is rather insulting to their cooking skills.
If you want to follow the traditional way of cooking rice, all you have to do is follow the instructions on the bag precisely. Different types of rice will require different amounts of water and different cooking times. But if you follow the instructions to a tee, you don’t have anything to worry about. As a final tip, refrain from lifting the lid every so often to check. Keep it closed until the very end, and you can be sure of having perfect results.
Steak Cooking Tips – The Secret to Perfection in Cooking Steak
When you go to a steak house, you get served with a juicy steak cut that’s been cooked to perfection – slightly charred on the outside but juicy on the inside, well-cooked but not overdone, soft but not raw, and every bite is a delight to the palate and the taste buds. It looks so simple but how come that when you try to cook steak at home, you can’t seem to come up with the same perfect steak? To get the perfect steak, you need to take several things into consideration. Here are some steak cooking tips that you can try when you cook steak at home.
Attaining perfection in cooking steak depends on a number of steak cooking tips. One is about the marinade. Some people have the wrong notion that the best steaks are made with very complicated marinades, with rare spices and all those secret formulations. Actually, the best steaks are those that have been marinated with the simplest and most basic of ingredients, like, say, just pepper and salt. Maybe you can sprinkle it with a little dash of Worcestershire sauce, but that’s all. When you eat steak, you want to enjoy the full taste of the meat; you don’t want to lose that in a confusion of so many different flavorings.
How long should you marinate the steak? That’s another question that would spell the difference between the perfect steak and a so-so piece of meat on your plate. This is where the general steak cooking tip “the more the better” would apply. Overnight works better than a few hours in terms of getting the flavor to really sink into the meat. If you will not have enough lead preparation time to marinate the steak, most steak cooking tips would tell you that marinating at least two hours would be good enough. How long you marinate would also depend on the thickness of the cut. A thick slab of steak would take longer to marinate but it is also better in terms of ensuring the tenderness and juiciness of the steak when cooked.
Of course, none of these steak cooking tips would work if you did not have a good steak cut to begin with. When you go to the meat shop, ask for the most tender lean part of the beef that does not have ligaments. You may get tenderloin or T-bone, but the part that is considered the best for the perfect steak is the rib eye, which gives out that luscious steak flavor even with the simplest marinade.