To prevent clumping when cooking long-grain basmati rice in an electric cooker, you follows a certain procedure.
First, prepare the rice without letting it touch any water. Why? Because the starch on its surface make the grains sticky. To remove that excess starch, you simply wash your rice and continue rinsing until the water begin to run fairly clear.
Cooking and finishing steps
Washing the rice until the water runs relatively clear are a crucial step because it removes the surface starch that causes grains to stick together.
It’s this one step that is so important to the finished texture.
Secondly, take precise measurements. In an Aroma cooker the right ratio are a solid 1:2. That’s right…one cup of rice to two cups of water.
It sounds like way too much water, but this particular grain require that much water to absorb. Too much water will resulted in mush and not enough will cause your rice to be hard. Be sure to take careful measurement. The right measurement is two cups of water for each cup of rice.
You put your rice in with water in the pot and check that the level is well below the maximum line on the inside rim. Rice needs to be kept far beneath the mark that says “Maximum Level” around the inside edge of the pot so it doesn’t boil over.
It waits patiently while the water warms up. Then you close the lid and wait.
Then you slide shut the lid and go around on the control panel. And wow! There are a lot of buttons to push: one for brown rice, another for quinoa.
But forget all that and push the button marked “White Rice” instead. That will take care of the cooking/heating part. No worries about temperature settings or timer adjustments; just press the button and leave it alone.
Patience is required for the cooking step. It takes approximately 50 minutes for the grains to fully cook.
At that point, you let the device maintains a steady heat. The water slowly absorbs and the contents build steam within the sealed container. Don’t be tempted to lift the lid; this lets out the steam and spoils the texture of the food. Wait it out (for the entire 50 minutes).
After the timer runs out, the cooker shuts itself off. Open the lid and there it is, transformed. The rice is no longer under water, just puffy, separate strands.
A gentle shake of the pot show the rice flowing freely, unstuck from the bottom. All that measuring and rinsing was worth it.
Then, you dish up the rice. It stay together on your spoon, but breaks apart with gentle pressure. Every single grain is visible. It’s fluffy and not like glue.
When you taste the rice, all your hard work has paid off: this rice tastes good.
If you wash well and adjust the water-to-rice ratio appropriately, making non-clumpy basmati rice are easy. It only takes attention to detail. Just feed in the correct ingredients, let the Aroma cooker do the rest, and voila!, you’ve got it done every time.