How to Cook · Part 3

Boiling & Steaming

Low, slow, and forgiving: turning tough, cheap cuts into something silky.

#Cooking with Water and Vapor

Boiling cooks food by surrounding it with hot water. Steaming cooks it with water vapor. Both methods are gentler than roasting or frying, but they still require control.

Not everything cooked in water should be boiled aggressively. Pasta benefits from a full boil, while potatoes, beans, and dumplings are often better at a steady simmer. Violent boiling can break apart their surfaces before their centers are cooked.

Steaming preserves the shape and concentrated flavor of an ingredient because it is not submerged in water. It is especially useful for vegetables and other delicate foods.

In either method, texture is the best test of doneness. Pasta should retain structure, potatoes should yield without falling apart, and vegetables should be tender without becoming limp.

#Rice

#On Rice Technique

Rice looks like a single ingredient, but it behaves like several. Two things decide how a pot turns out: the type of grain you start with and the method you cook it by. Most home-cook failures come from mismatching the two — trying to make basmati creamy, or short-grain rice fluffy.

Know your grain. Rice is sorted by length, and length is a rough guide to how much sticky starch a grain gives up:

Long-grain (basmati, jasmine, American long-grain) is low in the sticky starch and high in the firm one, so the grains cook up separate and fluffy. This is the choice for steamed rice, pilaf, and fried rice.
Medium-grain (Arborio, Carnaroli, paella rice) sits in between: tender, a little clingy, and creamy when stirred. This is risotto and paella territory.
Short-grain (Japanese sushi rice, glutinous rice) is the stickiest, cooking up soft and cohesive enough to eat with chopsticks or press into shape.

You can't swap freely between them — basmati will never turn creamy like risotto, and short-grain rice will always clump. Match the grain to the dish and half the work is already done.

Rinse for fluffy, leave it on for creamy. Rinsing washes off the loose surface starch that makes grains stick together. Rinse for long-grain steamed rice, pilaf, and Japanese rice, where you want distinct grains. Leave it on for risotto, where that starch is the entire point.

Toast before the liquid, when the dish calls for it. Coating the grains in fat and briefly toasting them — pilaf and risotto alike — helps each grain hold its shape and adds a faint nutty note.

Add liquid gradually for risotto. Risotto rice releases its starch as it's stirred and hydrated in stages. Dump all the liquid in at once and you skip that process, leaving an unevenly cooked, less creamy pot.

Resist the urge to lift the lid. For any steamed or absorbed rice, every peek releases steam you need for even cooking.

Buy a rice cooker. This is the one real piece of equipment advice here, and it's worth taking seriously. Everything below can be done in a pot on the stove, and it's worth knowing how — but a rice cooker does the one thing that's genuinely hard to manage by feel: holding a precise, gentle heat and then keeping the rice warm without scorching it. It frees up a burner, it's nearly impossible to get wrong, and a decent one lasts for years. If rice shows up on your table with any regularity, few tools this cheap will do more for your everyday cooking.