Basmati Chaaval (Perfect Basmati Rice): Madhur Jaffrey's "Indian Cooking"

"The Ill-est Meal I've had since Christmas" - Ed Squires, dinner guest

This post is actually all about rice. You see a lot of other dishes in the above photo, but rice is definitely the central point of any Indian meal. When you eat rice every day like in South-East Asia, it becomes an art form in itself. I make sushi. The rice is the most important, most complicated, and longest step. I also lived with an Indian girl for half a year, and even though she didn't cook very often, when she did she always made rice. Perfect rice. The kind that's tender and fluffy (never over-cooked), and the grains don't stick together. No rice cooker. Just experience to the point where it became second nature. To make it poorly would have been difficult. We got along very well, but this was not something we had in common. I covet her rice skills.

Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking has four basic rice recipes. Four! That doesn't even count the spiced rices, rice with peas, pullaos, and an authentically elaborate recipe for biryani. Kind of like every good French chef can make broth, every good Indian chef (and most mothers) can make perfect rice. I am not an Indian chef.

I bought the best rice. Indian Aged Basmati from Rube in St. Lawrence Market. It already smelled like cooked rice before I even turned on any heat. The aromatic was incredible. Delicious popcorn. I put my 3 cups of rice in a pot, covered it with water and gently moved the rice kernels around with my hand until the water turned cloudy. Then I poured off the water into a strainer (to catch the escaping rice), returned the draft dodgers to the pot, added more water, swirled, strained. I did this 5 times, since the recipe said 4-5 times. I decided to err on the side of caution.

Then I added 7 1/2 cups of water to the drained rice in the pot, and let it soak for 30 minutes. This keeps the rice separate when it cooks (in theory). I then drained the rice again.

Back into the large pot went the adequately drained rice, and 4 cups of water. I brought it to a boil, covered with a lid, turned the heat to VERY low (like I was supposed to) and cooked it for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes I lifted the lid to fluff the rice with a fork, only to discover the rice was starting to stick to the bottom of the pot! I got scared. It was still supposed to cook for 5-10 more minutes!

What do I do...what do I do?

3 options:
1. Add more water and let the rice cook longer. Water should not be added at this stage, though. You risk creating mushy rice. This option seemed like a good idea, though, because probably the rice needed more time to actually cook thoroughly. Probably the heat had been too high and the water that the rice was supposed to absorb had just evaporated. I didn't want under-cooked rice.
2. Turn off the heat now, set the rice aside, and eat it as it was, maybe a little under-cooked.
3. Do exactly what the recipe said and put it back on low heat for another 5-10 minutes, fully expecting the rice on the bottom of the pan to burn.

I took the first option. This way I'd definitely get cooked rice, but maybe over-cooked rice. That's just what happened, sadly. The rice became mushy and stuck together in big chunks, like jello towers of rice. It kind of wobbled, even. I broke it up with a spatula (I could have cut it into geometric shapes, it was so gelatinous...) and put it in a serving dish. The upside of this story is that the rice was going to serve as a bed for all the other sauce-y dishes, so it wasn't the end of the world. If I was serving grilled fish or meat on top, I would have been in trouble. The nice thing about Indian cooking is the stew-like consistency of most of the dishes. Nobody minded the mush rice. All my guests were overly Canadian and were all too polite to be offended by or insult my poor rice cooking skills. Hurray.

The next dish...yogurt...is not cooked. Thank goodness. There was hope that I would not mess this one up.