The Ultimate Guide to Cooking Rice the Indian Way
Read The Ultimate Guide to Cooking Rice the Indian Way Online
Authors: Prasenjeet Kumar
Tags: #Cookbooks; Food & Wine, #Cooking by Ingredient, #Rice & Grains, #Kitchen Appliances, #Rice Cookers, #Regional & International, #Asian, #Indian
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO COOKING RICE
THE INDIAN WAY
Prasenjeet Kumar
Copyright Prasenjeet Kumar 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Photographs of dishes have been provided wherever
possible. All photographs are taken by the author himself, in natural light,
without using any inedible garnish or props, and of the dishes that were made
right in his house. These are just meant to illustrate how exactly the dish
would look like if you prepared them yourself.
Your FREE Gift
As a way of saying thanks for your purchase, I’m offering an
e-book FREE as a gift.
Cooking home-made meals can do wonders for your health and
well-being. But a lot of times, a hectic work schedule does not let couples
create meals from scratch at home. I get a lot of questions from readers who
are willing to cook at home but do not find the necessary time and energy to do
so.
In this PDF (which is a 154-page or 22,000 word document), I
share the tips and techniques that anyone can use to create a complete
breakfast, lunch or dinner from scratch in less than 30 minutes.
You can download this free e-book by going here.
Disclaimers
Although the Author has made every effort to ensure that the
information in this book was correct at the time of publication, the Author
does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss,
damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or
omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.
This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical
advice of physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in
matters relating to his/her health and particularly with respect to any
symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.
This book also assumes that the reader does not suffer from
any food allergies or related medical conditions. Readers suffering from food
allergies are requested to skip the recipes that contains ingredients which
trigger adverse reactions in that reader or in his/her family and friends.
The spellings used in this book are British, which may
look strange to my American friends, but NOT to those living in Australia,
Canada, India, Ireland and of course the United Kingdom. This means that color
is written as colour and so on. I hope that is NOT too confusing!
Image Courtesy: Magentic Manifestations
"
Rice is a beautiful food. It is beautiful when it
grows, precision rows of sparkling green stalks shooting up to reach the hot
summer sun. It is beautiful when harvested, autumn gold sheaves piled on diked,
patchwork paddies. It is beautiful when, once threshed, it enters granary bins
like a (flood) of tiny seed-pearls. It is beautiful when cooked by a practiced
hand, pure white and sweetly fragrant."
Shizuo Tsuji
Saffron pulao (Saffron rice dish)
Chapter 2: Rice Cooked with Lentils
Khichdi (Mixture of Rice, Lentil and
Veggies Dish)
Chana Dal Khichdi (Rice dish cooked
with split chick pea)
Chapter 3: Rice Cooked with Veggies
Mixed Vegetable Cheese Biryani
Navratna Pulao (Nine Jewels Rice
dish)
Chapter 4: Rice Cooked with Meats
Chicken Kofta (Mince ball) Biryani
Chapter 5: Rice as Snacks and
Accompaniments
Chiura or Poha Fry (Savoury Rice
Flakes)
Idlis (Steamed rice and lentil cakes)
Baigun Bhaja (Aubergine fries)
Chawal Ka Kheer (Rice Pudding)
Natun Gud Ka Kheer (Rice Pudding with
Palm Jaggery)
Sakkarai Pongal (Sweet rice-lentil
dessert with milk)
Sweet Poha Kheer (Rice Flakes
Pudding)
An Introduction to the Common Indian
Spices
Excerpt from Home Style Indian
Cooking In A Jiffy
Books by the Author in Other Genres
Whenever the word ‘rice’ is mentioned, it invokes all kinds
of deep emotions within me.
My mom and dad used to make fun of me when I was a little
boy. This is because I needed rice for lunch and dinner and would just not eat
anything if it wasn’t served with rice.
You would have guessed by now that I am from a different
planet. A planet called ‘India’ which is located in a solar system called
‘Asia’.
When I was 3 years old, my mom and dad took me to another
planet known as the United States of America, more specifically to a country
inside that planet known as Los Angeles where my uncle lived.
The strangest thing I found about this planet was that there
was no rice. My uncle served soups, sausages, pizzas, burgers and spaghetti but
no rice!
“Is there no food to eat?” I queried after seeing an
apparently “food-laden” table, that left my uncle shell- shocked and my parents
not knowing where to look.
“What a Mr. Rice Eater!” I was referred to as by that name.
Today, I am no longer that fussy. I can eat anything for
lunch or dinner and am fine with anything and everything. Be it soups,
sandwiches, pizzas, pastas or rice! May be I have been corrupted by adulthood,
changes in lifestyle, living and studying for four years in a planet called
England. However, rice continues to have a special place in my heart.
Rice tastes really well with curries especially with my home
made variation of Butter Chicken or British Chicken Tikka Masala. The Indian
Basmati rice is my favourite and something I eat at my home by default. But I
also love the Thai variety known as ‘Jasmine rice’ which has a very sweet
fragrance that tastes absolutely fabulous with the Thai Green or Red or Penang
curry.
This is not to say that I don’t like bread. While living in
Europe for nearly four years, I had to develop a taste for all kinds of bread.
Every bread has its own taste, texture and hardness and I love that. But today
I am going to talk about only rice, my home and comfort food.
I find rice very filling that also gives me good sleep. By
the way, medical research has established that rice boosts your serotonin
levels making you happy and helping you sleep better. So I am not just
imagining things my way!
I am also an absolute defender of rice against ‘Western
onslaught’ (forgive me for using that term) of claims that rice leads to
obesity, or to increased body fat. Mind you I love rice, yet have a flat
belly. That is because I regulate my diet and exercise regularly.
In this background, I present to you over the next chapters
the nutritional benefits of having rice and the richness of the cultural
tradition associated with rice in India. After that you shall be free to savour
over thirty really mouth-watering my Home Style rice recipes constituting main
dishes, side dishes, snacks and even desserts.
Bon appetit
then!
Prasenjeet
"A diet that consists predominantly of rice leads to
the use of opium, just as a diet that consists predominantly of potatoes leads
to the use of liquor."
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Only rice likes to be drowned.”
Charles de Leusse
Doesn’t eating rice make you pot-bellied, like those Chinese
“Laughing Buddha” figurines?
Okay. Let’s disregard that as one of the old-wives’ tales.
Because if you look at people who live in villages in any
part of Asia: India, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Cambodia, etc., where
rice is the staple food, you will hardly find anyone who is fat or pot-bellied.
But speaking scientifically, isn’t rice so full of useless
starch, with less than 1% fat and really negligible amounts of protein?
Ahhhh…..yes.
So who really needs rice?
How about 70% of the world?
Or, almost any part of the world which is wet and humid and
NOT colder than 21 degree Celsius (70 degree F)?
Including USA and northern Canada?
Now we are talking.
The medicinal and nutritional properties of rice
Rice is “popular” because it is one of the easiest foods to
digest. Being totally gluten free, it is the best food for infants when they
have to be weaned. For young adults and old people too, who may have wheat
allergies or even celiac disease, eating rice would be what every sensible
doctor would prescribe.
For the same reason, rice is great for relieving digestive
disorders like diarrhoea, dysentery, colitis and even morning sickness.
In many traditional remedies, rice powder is used as a
soothing agent in skin infections or inflammations for diseases ranging from
chicken-pox and measles to prickly heat and simple burns.
Rice is high in complex carbohydrates, contains almost no
fat, is cholesterol free, and is low in sodium. It is a fair source of protein
containing all eight essential amino acids. It is low in the amino acid lysine,
which is found in beans and lentils, making the classic combination of rice and
beans, popularly known as complementary proteins, a particularly healthy dish.
The soluble fibre in brown rice helps lower the levels of
‘bad’ LDL cholesterol in the blood. The fibre also helps in increasing the
digestion time of this carbohydrate, as compared to other processed grains.
This means that it has a lower glycaemic index (GI) compared to other grains
that helps release sugar into the blood stream in a very slow and controlled
manner.
Half a cup of cooked brown rice typically provides 89
calories; 0 grams fat, including saturated fat or trans-fat, 0 milligrams
sodium, 45 grams total carbohydrate (15% Daily Value), 0 grams sugar, 3 grams
of protein, and some vitamins like B1 or thiamine (0.34 mg), riboflavin (0.05
mg), and niacin (4.7 mg).
A little history would now be in order
Experts are almost unanimous that while rice has grown in
India from time immemorial, it was taken to Greece by Alexander the Great
around 327 B.C.
Eastwards, it probably travelled with Buddhist monks (and
intrepid South Indian traders) to China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia and
all other countries of South-East Asia, where in any case some other varieties
of rice were already growing in the wild.
Arab travellers introduced rice to Egypt, Morocco and Spain.
Persian speaking tribes invading India took it to Persia, Turkey and Central
Asia. Portugal and Netherlands took rice to their colonies in West Africa. And
the Spaniards introduced rice to the Americas through the ’Columbian Exchange’
of natural resources.
Some nuggets about rice production
Believe it or not, but an Australian Government Report
claimed that almost 140,000 wild and cultivated rice varieties have been
identified so far. As per World Encyclopaedia, farmers even today cultivate
7000 to 8000 varieties of rice.
However, the most popular world cuisines use just three
prominent varieties of rice:
Indica
the long-grained aromatic variety
that is grown in India as Basmati rice;
Japonica
which is the shorter
and sticky variety that is popular in Japan for sushi and in Mediterranean
countries for dishes such as risotto and paella; and
Javanica
which is
medium grained, falls somewhat in between
Indica
and
Japonica
in
terms of stickiness, and is popular in South-East Asia and China.
Paddies, which literally mean puddles of water, depict a
very interesting agricultural practice. Despite seemingly standing in water,
they actually conserve water, as opposed to all other forms of farming that
require constant irrigation. When located on hilly slopes, as “terrace farms”,
they look so picturesque and picture postcard perfect that they can take literally
your breath away.
Image Courtesy: Konstantin Krismer
These plants are so tough that they adapt even to rising
flood waters. For example, some varieties in Bangladesh bear their grain above
the surface of the water, sometimes to depths of even five meters! A pastor of
Nagaland state in India recently received a Guinness World Record certificate
for discovering a 2.55 meter (8.5 feet) tall rice plant. The certificate
acknowledges that the rice plant, which the pastor found in October 1998 in the
state´s Chumukedi area "had 175 stalks and 510 grains in each ear"
making it the tallest paddy species found so far in the world.
In 2003, to make sure that the giant rice plant was not a
freak of nature, the pastor Melhite sowed the grains taken from the original
plant and planted them in his compound. The experiment produced similar results
with the new paddy plants measuring 9 feet, having 240 stalks and 460 grains in
each ear with each plant yielding 1.18 kg grains average.
Transplanting paddy is a very interesting agricultural
practice. One- to six-week-old seedlings are transplanted to basically give
them a head start over other competing weeds. Transplanting paddy also lets the
farmer adjust the planting calendar to accommodate his labour, water, and other
requirements. But still, for most small holdings, cultivating paddy remains a
back-breaking work.
In USA too, wealthy rice plantations before the Civil War
used to have hundreds of slaves. The 1849 gold rush brought many immigrants to
California, including an estimated 40,000 Chinese, whose staple food was rice.
Rice production then became a necessity.
But today technology has reduced the inherent drudgery
involved in rice cultivation. American mega-farms now use laser technology to
level field and to remove broken grains from the milled rice. Fields are seeded
by airplanes, and harvested by a single combine operator.
World rice production in 2014-15, according to the USDA, is
estimated to exceed 475 million metric tonnes. USA grows almost 7 million
tonnes which is surprisingly as much as what Japan grows and slightly more than
what Pakistan grows.
U.S. in fact is the world’s 12th largest exporter of rice.
Arkansas, northern California and Texas are leading growers. California alone
exports some 400,000 tons of rice to all over the world.
And this is when legend has it that rice reached the USA by
accident in 1685, when a storm-damaged ship from Madagascar took shelter in
Charleston, South Carolina. The captain of the ship gifted a small bag of gold
coloured rice to a local farmer.
The rest, as it is said, is History.
The ways rice is now consumed
Rice, of whatever kind, is not just used as a bed for
curries or a wrapper for sushi. It is also being cooked with meats in Biryanis,
with seafood in Paella, with wine in Risotto, with lentils in
Khichdi,
and with aromatic spices in
Pilaf
.
Rice flour is used in making pancakes and all kinds of
snacks in India.
Rice now has entered the breakfast space with such ready to
eat products as popped and puffed rice, and rice flakes.
Rice is used for such fermented drinks as
Chhang
without
which no festive occasion is considered complete in Ladakh, Tibet, or Bhutan.
Rice straw is used as cattle feed, for thatching roof, and
for making hats, mats, ropes, and sound absorbing straw boards.
Rice husk is used for making paper as well as briquettes to
be used as fuel source.
Rice bran is used in cattle and poultry feed.
Defatted bran, which is rich in protein, is used in the
preparation of biscuits and again as cattle feed.
Refined Rice bran oil is used for cooking. Rice bran wax, a
by-product of rice bran oil, is used for making soaps and lubricating material.
Phew! Do we need to say anything more about the myriad ways
in which the paddy plant benefits mankind?