Rice - Gohan

Hi Everyone!

Phew getting these recipes out quickly is a bit rough, but Emily arrives in Japan literally in the next hour or so. I'd like her to have something for her first day  ^_^

Gohan: Means cooked rice, rice is that important that it gets to be the word that defines your meal.

Asagohan: Breakfast
Ohirugohan: Lunch
Yuugohan: Dinner

Notice the pattern?

Today I'll show you how I make rice.

In Japan they have Japonica rice, it's a short grain glutinous rice. Great for chopsticks to pick up with ease and just tastes great.

I use a rice cooker, the brand I have is Zojirushi. It's very easy to use, it comes with a little measuring cup and you just fill it up with how much rice you want and there's a little line inside the bowl that tells you how much water is needed for how many cups you put in it.

Now what if you lost that little cup? I know it's happened before to someone you feel doomed and you try to measure rice in your measuring cup and for some reason the rice doesn't taste the same or doesn't cook the same. Helpful hint, the measuring cup they give you does not equal 1 US measuring cup. It actually measures at 3/4 cup so if you ever lose that precious piece of plastic you now know how to measure without it.

Today I had made 2 cups of rice. Now it sounds so easy just dump the rice and put in the water put it in the machine and press start..........no.......don't do that....please pretty please. You need to WASH your rice first, unless you're in Japan and are able to purchase pre-washed rice, yes that exists and I wish it existed here.

First you measure your rice, put it in the bowl.
Add some water and slowly move your fingers around in the bowl don't be too rough you don't want to break the grains of rice.
You'll begin to see the water get cloudy and white.
This is the first washing, it looks like the rice is sitting in milk.

Drain this water and repeat the washing for a second time.

This time you'll see that it's less cloudy.

Drain this water and repeat this step 1 to 2 more times.

You'll see the water get clearer, we're not aiming for perfectly clear but we don't want the water to be murky either.

I washed mine 3 times. This helps to remove some of the gluten at least that's what I hear.

After draining, you'll fill up the bowl to the water line of how many cups you put in.

I did 2 so if you see the line I put it at was between the 1 and the 3 for the white rice marker.

I then took this to my rice cooker and put it in, closed the lid, plugged in the cooker.

Made sure it was on the setting for white rice and pressed start.

It took about an hour to cook.

I would like to say in the most nerdy fashion, my rice cooker SINGS to me.

This is seriously like the most idiotic thing to love about a rice cooker but I just get all happy when it starts playing its chime to tell me I set it to cook and playing again when it's done.

*Nerdy squeal of joy!*

After the rice cooker tells you it's done doing its job, do NOT open the rice cooker, let it chill out for 10 minutes or so. The rice will improve in texture if you do this, I'm not sure why if anyone can explain that please do I'm all ears.

Once those 10 minutes are up, take your rice paddle and make little slashes into the rice, I do it in both directions so it looks like a checker board. I then proceed to flip the rice and slash a few more times so the rice is fluffed up.

I hope this tutorial was helpful.

If you have a rice cooker that's a different brand just follow the instructions for it along with washing the rice and you should have great tasting rice ^__^