- Doom Rooster
- Sep 3, 2008
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Pillbug
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The best rice for rice pudding is the rice you have left over in your fridge.
Edit: Wild rice is probably the only rice I haven’t/wouldn’t use.
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Dec 13, 2023 22:33
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May 21, 2024 12:26
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- Doom Rooster
- Sep 3, 2008
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Pillbug
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Well, everything I've read about rinsing rice specifically says to rinse until the water runs clear.
Yeah. Clear is a relative term. At first it will be pretty much completely opaque. Once you’re to slightly cloudy, you’re good.
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Dec 24, 2023 18:30
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- Doom Rooster
- Sep 3, 2008
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Pillbug
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dino., what is the best rice, and why is it Sona Masoori?
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Jan 16, 2024 23:32
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- Doom Rooster
- Sep 3, 2008
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Pillbug
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Those are fighting words, especially to a guy from Tamil Nadu. We rep Ponni rice, and we rep it HARD
I went out and got some Ponni to make pongal after your post about it. It was delicious, and we’ll probably be making it every month for the foreseeable future.
What else should I do with the Ponni?
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Jan 19, 2024 15:11
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- Doom Rooster
- Sep 3, 2008
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Pillbug
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Yeah. Just eat a 1/2 cup of the Uncle Ben’s straight up, then wash it down with 3/4 cup of water. No need to waste time microwaving it.
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Feb 5, 2024 05:01
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- Doom Rooster
- Sep 3, 2008
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Pillbug
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Hey OP! I've got a rice-related work problem for ya.
I'm a chef/food scientist/product developer at a medium-large Canadian food processor. We deal with a lot of cooked grains, dressings + sauces, and salad kits. We were recently contacted by a very large customer to provide samples for a 30+ day shelf life cooked sushi rice for use in poke bowls. It's a super high volume item, and I'm the primary developer on it (and also one of two people in this nationwide company that knows anything about food). We've been struggling pretty hard recently, if we get this business they will build me a fuckin statue. I've been doing a ton of bench work on this, and have figured out a seasoning blend that tastes real good, but can't seem to get the texture right. We've sent initial samples to the customer and they like the flavour, but agree that the grains aren't as separate as they should be. Our next round of samples is due next week, because of course it is, and since my company is a disaster I'm busy putting out fires constantly and can't sit on the bench and devote myself to actually testing things properly.
Right now the recipe is as follows (quantities rounded):
88.5% 'Cooked' Calrose rice (9 min in a screw cooker. I know it's undercooked, the sous-vide process finishes the job)
3.5% Rice Vinegar @ 4% acetic acid
3.5% Sugar
2.5% Inulin Fibre (recommended to me by someone smart, willing to remove)
0.8% Table Salt
0.1% Miola Rice Conditioner (difficult to procure on our insane timeline and would like to cut it if necessary)
0.1% Yeast Extract
Our usual process is as follows:
Cook the rice in a screw cooker for a determined period of time (no wash step, sorry  )
Drain and chill it to 4C.
Put the random seasonings, veggies etc in and mix
Pack in vacuum bags
Sous vide the exact minimum amount of time to hit our F-value targets
I've tried various permutations of the following things:
-Removing the inulin fibre (actually makes the texture worse!)
-Lowering the cook time (texture becomes bad in a different, crunchy way)
-Increasing the cook time, removing the sous vide step, and packing the product in MAP seal bags (still goopy)
-Using powdered acid to remove some liquid from the final product (still goopy)
-Washing the rice (HUGE pain in the rear end for production, will skyrocket the final cost of the product, might not even be possible for the huge volume of product we'd have to produce, still goopy)
-Using Calrose from different suppliers (still goopy)
The customer already mentioned using thread favorite Koshihikari rice in their gold standard samples. Our procurement team can't get it in sufficient quantities in time for the theoretical product launch, so it's out of the picture. Plus it's way too expensive anyway.
What do? Are there rice varietals/suppliers I should look out for? Is my recipe just hosed? Am I missing a panacea-like ingredient that will fix all of my problems and make me less of a bitter husk of a human being? Should I convince our operations department to blow a bunch of money on specialized equipment that will collect dust the second the customer finds a product that is 1 cent cheaper and delists our product? Should I just burn this place down and go full prepper and forsake modern life and live in the woods except I have a sick PC, internet connection, and tons of games?
Not the OP, but what is your mixing procedure/equipment like at step 4?
Edit: Also, what pressure are you vac sealing to? Is that negotiable?
Doom Rooster fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Mar 5, 2024
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Mar 5, 2024 23:18
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- Doom Rooster
- Sep 3, 2008
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Pillbug
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Wage slave takes a paddle to it until it looks mixed. We also have a dedicated mixing device but it's far too destructive to this product. It's moot right now since we're still doing everything by (my soft, supple, chef) hand in the test kitchen. Scaling it up in production will be a huge headache and thankfully not my problem yet.
Vac seal pressure is absolutely negiotiable, we have a minimum setting that we use for rice items like this one to prevent clumping. Regardless, it's still gluey in a modified atmosphere (aka MAP) bag, which doesn't have any vacuum seal or sous vide step.
I'm starting to wonder if the issue here is limited to the test kitchen, since we're cooking it real low tech (in a pot on the stove). In our screw cooker, it will basically take a 95C shower for X amount of time so it may not be sitting in a filthy bath of its own starch. Unfortunately the minimum quantity we can run through the screw cooker is 1000kg. I'm having trouble getting more than 5kg samples since all of our suppliers loving hate us, lol. And it's not like I can stop production from using the thing that makes us the most money to run some crazy experiments anyway.
Sucks about not being able to use the screw cooker. Soak and steam is definitely the number 1 thing I would point to, to start with. Can you get your hands on a smaller steamer setup?
Water ratio, soak and steam times obviously will all have an effect.
The following may or not be scalable. You’ll know far better than I, but these are things that I would do if trying to achieve your goal working on my own, much smaller scale.
Cool, then mix via tumbler, instead of paddle machine. Add seasoned vinegar mixture during tumbling, allow a few minutes to absorb, then add the inulin fiber(hoping that hydrated inulin fiber is not as sticky as something like rice flour. I know what it is, but have no experience actually working with this ingredient.)
Stick with minimum pressure vac.
If you have a slightly too low hydration on the cook, the additional moisture from the seasoned vinegar, plus the sous vide might finish softening, but reduce mush/stickiness.
Hail Mary option: Freeze prior to vac seal to accomplish both drying, and lessen mechanical smushing force during vac process.
Understood about the washing being unscalable, but yeah, that would literally be the first step on small scale.
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Mar 6, 2024 17:06
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May 21, 2024 12:26
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- Doom Rooster
- Sep 3, 2008
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Pillbug
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I spent a good part of the pandemic improving my fried rice, specifically getting it to taste like the stuff you get at a good hibachi place. I've nailed most of the seasonings and flavors now, but I'm not sure I'm using the best rice.
My go-to white rice at home is Thai Jasmine long-grain (usually Mahatma brand). It's great with just about anything else, but it doesn't seem to fry well for me. I've tried the cookie sheet method right out of the rice cooker, and I've also let it sit in a large bowl in the fridge overnight.
The problem is that this rice is extremely sticky and hard to break up, which results in uneven frying and sometimes some crunchy bits. Drying it helps a bit, but the window between "slightly easier to separate" and "so dry that it turns black the second it touches the pan" seems tiny.
Should I try a different type of rice for this?
A lot of places use 50/50 jasmine/long grain white. The jasmine tastes good, and feels more substantial. The long grain white separates easier (and is cheaper, as a bonus).
Even doing super dried out 100% jasmine on a restaurant jet burner, I haven’t experienced “so dry that it turns black the second it touches the pan” though. I mean, we would purposefully let it sit for 5-6 seconds on max heat to get a little bit of dark brown on it, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
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Mar 15, 2024 21:30
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Dec 13, 2023 22:33
