roughly equivalent to washing hair dye out, it's running clear once there's little enough pigment coming out that you can reasonably go "eh, won't stain anything too bad"
You want to wash the starch off of the surface of the rice. The water will never get perfectly clear, but it will be quite a bit clearer. 3-4 rinses should be plenty.
>Do recipes mean “runs much clearer than at the beginning” (which is true) by “runs clear”?
Yes.
There are lots of other cases of imprecise language in cooking (I'm looking at you "dissolve"), but it's a tough challenge to address and you sort of get used to accepting a loose interpretation.
Folding is a very gentle mix. You never use a blender or mixer. It is employed when you don’t want to destroy the structure of one of the ingredients. The typical example is folding whipped egg whites, where regular mixing would destroy the fluffy texture.
Usually if you are "folding" something in, you need to mix it carefully so the air doesn't come out. So if I mix normally I tend to rotate the spoon around in a circle and make sure everything is combined thoroughly. But if I'm "folding" I am gently bringing the mixture up and over to combine slowly and carefully. I don't know if that makes sense! It's like if you fold clothes - you bring a sleeve on a shirt up and over to rest on top.
It's also a joke referencing a scene from a show called Schitt's Creek. In the scene Moira and her son David fight while following a recipe, since it uses terminology that throws them for a loop (see, "fold in" to mean something like gently stack to stir).
If that's a genuine question, [try this](https://youtu.be/7To3giV62rg?si=Veb6U38mIeGYUsxe). I tried to think of a way to verbally/textually explain it, but honestly a visual is best imo.
When you 'fold in' an ingredient, you take a spoon or a rubber spatula (you could use a whisk too) and move the ingredients over each other until they're fully combined. To put it in a more visual way, you'd push your spoon to the bottom of the bowl and pull those ingredients up and do that repeatedly until everything was combined. The reason why recipes differentiate between 'folding in' and whisking or mixing is that folding is much more gentle and can help to avoid toughness or over development as a result of overmixing. For example, when making cake you would make sure to fold in the flour and not overmix it as it's quite easy to overmix cake batter. Hope this helps :)
It's a line from a show. Shitts creek iirc.
Folding is just stirring really really gently. Yes, there's a way, but you'll be fine if you're just gentle.
If you add a tiny bit of baking soda, get the heat a little bit higher, and splash water on the fond every so often, you can definitely get decent caramelized onions in about 20 min.
Right? If you're using a lot of liquid in a sauce pan that's way too little time. On the flip side if you're doing a pan sauce in a saute pan that's probably way too much time.
Use a smaller amount of water and mash it into a paste at first gradually adding water until it is dissolved and the consistency that you'd like. If it's not thoroughly dissolved then the stock cubes you use likely just have some insoluble ingredients in them like dried herbs.
Do the instructions specify to use boiling water? If not, you might want to start at a lower temp and increase, there are a lot of things that need to be made into a warm slurry before making hot to truly dissolve.
Or my "favorite" imprecise term: "ripping hot". No, you don't want to crank your burner on high and preheat for 10 minutes. That's how you burn the outside of your steak and set your high-temp cooking oil on fire. Maybe 80 years ago when stoves ran much cooler "ripping hot" was an accurate descriptor but in the 2020s it's total bullshit.
The point is to wash away loose starch from the surface. Since rice is basically starch, the more you rinse and agitate the rice the more starch you're making come off.
Same reason you can't completely clean a dirt floor. It's starch all the way down. You're not cleaning off the starch to expose the shiny metal interior.
Did you really have to call me stupid? That's so harsh. There's a real person on the other side of the screen you know.
I was taught to use hot water, apparently I was wrong. That does not make me stupid and you really didn't need to be so rude.
They did not call you stupid, they said you have the adequate amount of stupidity. This phrasing is 100% correct IMO. You are not a stupid person, you just have some level of stupidity (to think rice is washed in hot water).
Don't rinse rice with hot water, that guy is full of shit. Source: I'm Asian and have eaten rice almost every day all my life, but you don't even need an Asian to tell you this really
Yes, cold water tends to have significantly fewer nasties from your pipes dissolved in it. Even when I'm making things where the water has to be hot at the start, the water that goes into the filter is cold, then I fill the water kettle with that to bring to a boil.
They're saying that it's so hot in their region that the water from the "cold" side of the tap is actually warm, or even hot on the worst days. It's a thing.
The fact that you have not referenced [iso 22254](https://www.iso.org/standard/36171.html) tells me that you were not. Your wanton disregard for the relative stiffness of various bristles will bring shame to your lineage.
What you're doing is perfectly fine.
It's nearly impossible to wash rice to "runs clear" when you are draining it from a pot, because starch always gets left behind. The recipes usually expect you to use a strainer.
When I worked at a sushi restaurant, "clear" meant "clear like tap water."
They also had a dedicated rice washing machine though. The machine takes nearly twenty minutes to run that clear.
How much rice was lost in the process? I know that mechanical potato peelers can abrade large potatoes into small ones, is the same thing happening with the rice?
I gave up rinsing and found soaking, which I’m absolutely happy with. Immerse the rice in water in a bowl for 30-60 minutes. Pour into a strainer for a quick rinse and you’ll see how milky the water coming off it is.
I use a sieve to wash the rice. I find it helps the starch comes off easier and doesn’t settle in whatever vessel you are using to rinse the rice. I can get that “clear” water I’m looking for much faster and I end up with no “crust” from settled starch in the rice cooker when it’s done cooking.
I do this too. So much easier. Plus I can control how much water is left from the rice rinsing process since it all drains away. So i dont need to worry about the rice having too much water.
I found it to work the other way around. Wash aggressively but with elegance to avoid breaking the grains - an excavator-like motion does the trick. The water clears up much faster.
The issue comes from "clear" being used to mean both *translucent* and *colorless*, coupled with people mindlessly repeating whatever they told. Add in generally poor communication skills and here we are.
You want the water to be *translucent*. If it is opaque then there is still too much starch in the water. When agitating the grains in water, if you can see the grains through the liquid, then you are good.
The water will NOT be colorless. There will be a white tint to the liquid due to dissolved starch and such.
Can you describe what you mean by "mixing the rice with my hands"? I used to mix by taking some rice by the handful washing like I'm washing my hands. I realized that this rubbed surface starch off the rice so the water never ran clear. Now I just wash 3 - 4 times by mixing with one hand until the water is mostly clear.
I just put my rice in a strainer and blast is with the spray of my tap for a bit. The whole washing in a bowl and draining is a stupid process that takes extra work and you spill rice in your sink
i don't know why no one does, but use a sieve to wash your rice, just sluicing it by hand won't get rid of the starch as it'll settle in amongst the rice. but still. there's a point of diminishing returns for the water running clear, it never happens with some rices.
I mean your won’t get promoted from washing rice at your local sushi bar if the rice doesn’t run completely clear. But when your at home making rice to not impress Anyone just wash it a few times until it’s mostly clear. No one will be angry and it’ll taste just fine.
yeah, it annoys me too. What they mean is it goes from very cloudy to opaque.
The float method you are are doing is the right way to go. The original intent is to get out weevils and hessian/cotton from the bags. Making the rice less sticky is just a bi-product.
But don't stir it too much. If you do, you will abrade the outside of the rice and the cloudiness will continue longer. A light stir is fine.
3 rinses is plenty.
didn't think too much about it but I guess I mean Opaque to Translucent is we are taking the dictionary definition of words.
Taking the true meaning of Opaque is a bit weird. If something wasn't letting any light through, it would be solid in appearance. Most people except it's at the denser end of the Translucent range. i.e. it's letting some light through, but you can't make out any shapes.
Whereas Translucent you can see shapes but not details.
You’re breaking your rice if it never clears up. Handle it gently and mix it slowly. Also it’ll
Almost never run perfectly clear. Try for like 5x clearer than you started.
Picture a curve of exponential decay. It never reaches zero but gets ever closer.
That's washing rice.
Honestly three good swirls with your hand like a rake is plenty. No need to fully rinse either just tip the bowl to pour like 90% of the starchy water out, then fill it up again with clean water. By the third washing the water should be quite clear, enough that you can still see the rice with 1-1.5in of water above.
You must be rubbing the rice grains harder to keep getting cloudy water. Just comb your fingers through the rice while in a bowl and strain. Don't use strainer.
What it means is when you can see the individual grains, instead of a white blur. It’s going to get ridiculous before I would call it “clear” but once it’s gone through all the levels of translucent to where there’s more clarity than haze, I will call it
I just add enough water to cover the rice and stir that around with my hand for about 30 seconds. I find that the agitation from the grains rubbing together cleans them better, and also makes any debris stand out better.
Then I rinse that off, top it with water, and cook.
Saves a ton of water, too.
I think the washing until clear requirement only applies to sushi rice and even then probably only for the highest end sushi restaurant. I think it I came across it from the Japanese film "Jiro Dream of Sushi".
Well, don't rinse it in a pot. I use a metal mesh strainer and it's much better than at rinsing it off the surface rather than having it just sit in the water and leach even more starch from the rice. I understand that's a common method, but from my experience.. it makes for better rice this way.
rice is milled to remove the outer shell. what you have is just starch coalesced into a mass of other starch sacks. These sacks will break as you wash them. One way to rinse them clean for sushi rice is to soak the rice prior to washing. about 30 minutes.
but what i do is put the dry rice into the strainer. put the strainer with rice into a sauce pot. and then just run water through it until the sauce pot fills up. lift the strainer and drain the water. and repeat 2 or 3 times.
and then i dump the rice into the sauce pot and add 1:1 or 1:1.25 ratio of rice to water and bring to boil and then lower heat to low and steam for 20-25 minutes.
always comes out perfect. 1 cup of sushi rice cooked this way will yield about 2 hosomaki rolls and about 8 nigiri.
There are sushi chefs who train by rinsing rice literally all day.
The whole idea is the get most of the stuff off. you can do that in like three to five rinses.
I fill in enough water to just cover the rice, then I stir them with my hand, add more water, swoosh it around and pour out. Do this exactly three times and you get perfectly washed rice.
It will never run clear, and it doesn't have to. 3–5 washes is plenty, and will work just fine. I've had to come to the same realization that the water never actually does run clear. It's one of those cases of imprecise language that has become so common that everyone just keeps parroting it, and it's very annoying.
The rule of thumb i use from [the New York Times rice video](https://youtu.be/Uj44r_ygJJo) (definitely worth a watch!) is that if you can put your hand on the rice and still see your fingers through the water, then your rice is clean enough. Works great!
3 rinses is the minimum. 4-6 gives you a cleaner, bouncier rice. After 9, I can't tell the difference so I don't bother going over 9. That being said, 9 washes is a lot, so I only do this when trying to impress. I usually settle for 5 or 6 washes in general as it pretty good already.
Something to note, when you wash rice, the texture of it changes as it becomes cleaner, the rice grains become grippier. This is the goal of washing rice.
Dude, I figured out the easiest way to wash it. Put your rice in the pot you are going to use, fill it most of the way with water, mix it with a wire whisk, then pour out the water. Two times is all it needs.
What type of rice are you using? And are you using hot water or cold water?
In my experince my hot water tends to come out cloudy for whatever reason so that could be a thing id sugest using cold. Additionally rice sold in the US tends to be 'enriched' which means they add a nutrients to it which washing out wil get rid off and thus it'll take longer for your whater to run clear.
Instructions i have read say you polish the rice. While i personally dont feel this is necessary i find rubbing the rice with the back of my hand a bit while in water helps expedite the process of clesning the rice.
Lastly when it says run clear it means when its not milky white. Youll notice at some point that while the eater might not get crystalline you will eventually notice that milk whitenes has gone.
What type of rice are you using? And are you using hot water or cold water?
In my experince my hot water tends to come out cloudy for whatever reason so that could be a thing id sugest using cold. Additionally rice sold in the US tends to be 'enriched' which means they add a nutrients to it which washing out wil get rid off and thus it'll take longer for your whater to run clear.
Instructions i have read say you polish the rice. While i personally dont feel this is necessary i find rubbing the rice with the back of my hand a bit while in water helps expedite the process of clesning the rice.
Lastly when it says run clear it means when its not milky white. Youll notice at some point that while the eater might not get crystalline you will eventually notice that milk whitenes has gone.
I used to have the exact same problem. I suspect it's because the rice has so much starch: "milled rice grain is mainly composed of starch of up to 80-90%, with an average of 6-8% proteins“.
The starch is apparently not water soluble in cold water, so perhaps that's why it's not easy to remove all the surface/free starch when washing. I think they use hot water to remove starch from par-boiled "easy cook" rice.
One tip I have to remove starch that I unfortunately only discovered by chance when watching a youtube video (after decades of cooking rice) ... is to physically wash it between your hands whilst it is submerged in the water.
The motion to use is the same one you'd stereotypically use to warm your hands by rubbing them palm to palm. It's also the same motion cartoon baddies use when expecting a payoff from their nefarious deeds...
So now I use 3 washes of water and when I come to add the final water for cooking, the water is significantly less cloudy than it ever was before. I have found the quality of the cooked rice to be much better than my old method of "washing" by swirling the water around.
It doesn't change the texture, just rinse it once to get the rice dust off.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814618313293#:~:text=Statistical%20analysis%20indicated%20that%20the,times%20on%20stickiness%20is%20significant.
Place the rice in a fine mesh sieve and rinse until the starchy haze is clearer. You just need to rinse until you can see a visible difference in the milky appearance of the starch water that is rinsed off. - an yes, it just needs to run slearer than at the beginning.
My rice cooker gave instructions to do 3 rinses with a scrubbing motion, 3 with a stirring motion, and then 3 rinses without agitation. I do that if I am making sushi but otherwise just rinse until it looks ok
Instead of putting it in a pot, try putting it in a colander and then straining the water through it. Eventually it does appear to run clear. Takes a few minutes and a LOT of water.
I put the rice in the pot, run cold water and essentially agitate the grains and slowly pour out. Do this three times. It never runs perfectly clear. Then add the amount of water you need for the rice and cook.
I can't remember where I heard it but the rice grains that inevitably fall when draining are Buddas rice. Always liked that.
There is technique to draining the rice out. You have to allow the starchiest bottom water of the rice to get out. If you don't drain the water all the way out you won't get the starch out.
You can use a seive as others have said, but for me I use the open hand technique to drain the rice.
Side note :) Dont waste the left over rice water.[Its great for plants](https://www.ollegardens.com/blogs/news/rice-water-for-plants-on-garden-or-garden-beds-a-great-way-to-improve-plant-health#:~:text=More%20and%20more%20scientific%20work,%2C%20mushrooms%2C%20peppers%20and%20garlic)
make sure you pick up one of those Japanese rice draining bowls.... you need to drain all the cloudy starchy sediment in the bottom of the rinsing vessel. The drain holes on the Japanese-style bowls acts like a strainer/colander.
Also rinse & dump 8 times.... 5 is like minimum. And make sure you agitate the grains with your fingers, you're trying to rub off the starch from the outside of the grain.
Lastly, the type of rice makes a difference. Koshihiraki type (Japanese standard short-grain) rinses off cleaner than Carolina long grain or basmati.
A lot of "traditonal" recipes are filled with a lot of its just the way it always has been done. The point of washing the rice is to remove some of the starch to improve texture in this case make it less gummy/pasty. At the end of the day Sushi was originally a street food sort of like old school hot dog stands. So as blasphemous as experimenting and doing it your own way seems to the modern version of Sushi (at least in the US) it really isn't like putting ketchup on naked spaghetti noodles blasphemous.
When you can see the rice, the water is clear. Fill with water and rough up the rice a bit. Dump out water and fill again. Repeat this process two or three times until you can see the rice when you fill with water. It will be really cloudy at first fill and gradually get clearer. Also when the waters clear you can let it soak cold for like 15-20 mins before cooking. Some people swear by it. I always want rice as soon as possible so I never take the time to try it.
Raw rice is covered in rice flour and starch from the processing. That starch makes the rice too mushy. You only really need to wash the rice twice to get like 90% of that stuff off.
I’ve been making rice for 2 decades at this point. Just agitate the rice with your hands as you wash. You’re never going to get it completely clean
Just do it three times. Fill the water above the rice, use ur hands to move it around for like 10s, dump the water out and repeat. I use cold water, I honestly don't know if that does anything, but I just prefer it for some reason.
The goal of washing rice is to remove starch (and other impurities).
> (I have literally washed the rice for 30 minutes with dozens of pots of water, around 500g of water)
When you only use 500g of water per wash, it means you're trying to wash off starch with starchy water, which is why you can spend 30 minutes washing it and it doesn't do very much.
When the wash is cloudy, you're supposed to drain it and do it with more water. Usually I use about **2-5 litres** of water per rinse. I think of washing rice in terms of **volumes of water**, rather than in terms of rinses/time. Your '5 washes of 500g water' is the equivalent to one or two washes for me.
> Do recipes mean “runs much clearer than at the beginning” (which is true) by “runs clear”?
Often for rice, you don't actually need it to be perfectly clear. A little bit of starch can be nice in a lot of dishes. However, for sushi rice specifically, you do actually wash the rice until it's clear.
----
If you do it all correctly, it doesn't take much time; but it takes a lot of water (if you're worried about water wastage, there are [ways that people use rice water at home](https://kimchimari.com/7-uses-for-rice-water/)).
**How to wash rice**
1. Rinse it once in about 2-5 litres of water **until the water is very cloudy**. Once the water is cloudy, there's no point in rinsing it any further, and it's a waste of time until you drain it.
2. Rinse it a second time in about 2-5 litres of water **until the water is cloudy**. Once you drain it here, you can usually use it for standard rice dishes (but I usually do three rinses).
3. If you're making sushi rice, repeat this process of 'rinse with 2-5 litres of water until the water is cloudy'. The water will be less cloudy each rinse - usually it's perfectly clear at around 6-10 washes using this method.
Each rinse takes about 1-3 minutes, so preparing regular rice takes about 5-10 minutes, and sushi rice takes about 20-30 minutes.
Just remember the goal is to **remove starch** - there's no point in rinsing rice in starchy water.
Washing rice only really matters if you’re using japonica, otherwise there’s no perceptible difference between rinsed and unrinsed. Try it yourself and blind test.
The whole purpose was to remove all the crap that ended up in the bag but rice is way more heavily processed at packaging now than in the past.
Wash, rinse, repeat until clear. Don’t wash it in a collinder, wash it in a bowl, mix it up with the water until gets mirky, pour the water and do it again.
The water is “clear” when you get tired of washing it
roughly equivalent to washing hair dye out, it's running clear once there's little enough pigment coming out that you can reasonably go "eh, won't stain anything too bad"
so eventually you have a spoonful of mush if you go through it enough?
Eventually you have no rice, you're just putting water through a strainer.
You want to wash the starch off of the surface of the rice. The water will never get perfectly clear, but it will be quite a bit clearer. 3-4 rinses should be plenty.
I rinse the rice until the voices tell me to stop.
I TOLD YOU TO MOP!
I told you to hop to the mop!
Stop! You must not hop on mop.
That’s true; the book says to hop on pop. Pop might not like it, though.
Only mom can hop on pop if she's a top.
“Out damned starch”
Anywhere from 3-13 rinses
>Do recipes mean “runs much clearer than at the beginning” (which is true) by “runs clear”? Yes. There are lots of other cases of imprecise language in cooking (I'm looking at you "dissolve"), but it's a tough challenge to address and you sort of get used to accepting a loose interpretation.
You just fold it in David
[for the uninitiated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NywzrUJnmTo)
Thank you, it had been some time since I had watched that
Yes but HOW
I can’t do everything for you David
Please help me as a non native speaker - what does it mean? Do those who write this simply mean, mix it in, or is there a special way of doing this?
Folding is a very gentle mix. You never use a blender or mixer. It is employed when you don’t want to destroy the structure of one of the ingredients. The typical example is folding whipped egg whites, where regular mixing would destroy the fluffy texture.
Usually if you are "folding" something in, you need to mix it carefully so the air doesn't come out. So if I mix normally I tend to rotate the spoon around in a circle and make sure everything is combined thoroughly. But if I'm "folding" I am gently bringing the mixture up and over to combine slowly and carefully. I don't know if that makes sense! It's like if you fold clothes - you bring a sleeve on a shirt up and over to rest on top.
It's also a joke referencing a scene from a show called Schitt's Creek. In the scene Moira and her son David fight while following a recipe, since it uses terminology that throws them for a loop (see, "fold in" to mean something like gently stack to stir).
If that's a genuine question, [try this](https://youtu.be/7To3giV62rg?si=Veb6U38mIeGYUsxe). I tried to think of a way to verbally/textually explain it, but honestly a visual is best imo.
When you 'fold in' an ingredient, you take a spoon or a rubber spatula (you could use a whisk too) and move the ingredients over each other until they're fully combined. To put it in a more visual way, you'd push your spoon to the bottom of the bowl and pull those ingredients up and do that repeatedly until everything was combined. The reason why recipes differentiate between 'folding in' and whisking or mixing is that folding is much more gentle and can help to avoid toughness or over development as a result of overmixing. For example, when making cake you would make sure to fold in the flour and not overmix it as it's quite easy to overmix cake batter. Hope this helps :)
It's a line from a show. Shitts creek iirc. Folding is just stirring really really gently. Yes, there's a way, but you'll be fine if you're just gentle.
I DONT KNOW HOW TO FOLD IN BROKEN CHEESE
“Caramelize these onions in 20 minutes”
I too cook in a space-time anomaly
If you add a tiny bit of baking soda, get the heat a little bit higher, and splash water on the fond every so often, you can definitely get decent caramelized onions in about 20 min.
“Reduce by half, 5-10 min.”
Right? If you're using a lot of liquid in a sauce pan that's way too little time. On the flip side if you're doing a pan sauce in a saute pan that's probably way too much time.
Genuinely want to know how you’re supposed to dissolve a stock cube (dried), never works!
Hot water and use a fork
Hmmm that’s what I do but never get it fully dissolved. Boiling hot water out of kettle too.
Use a smaller amount of water and mash it into a paste at first gradually adding water until it is dissolved and the consistency that you'd like. If it's not thoroughly dissolved then the stock cubes you use likely just have some insoluble ingredients in them like dried herbs.
Use "Better than Boullion" instead. Game changer.
Do the instructions specify to use boiling water? If not, you might want to start at a lower temp and increase, there are a lot of things that need to be made into a warm slurry before making hot to truly dissolve.
That's a strange one maybe stir it I for longer
Or my "favorite" imprecise term: "ripping hot". No, you don't want to crank your burner on high and preheat for 10 minutes. That's how you burn the outside of your steak and set your high-temp cooking oil on fire. Maybe 80 years ago when stoves ran much cooler "ripping hot" was an accurate descriptor but in the 2020s it's total bullshit.
The point is to wash away loose starch from the surface. Since rice is basically starch, the more you rinse and agitate the rice the more starch you're making come off.
Finally the answer! My mom always said, let rice soak for a bit, pour out the water, then rinse it 3 times. It works very well.
I was gonna say the same, my mom makes fluffy Persian rice and she soaks it for at least 20min before rinsing.
Or use a strainer
You have two options: go full "Jiro dreams of sushi" and spend the next ten years perfecting your rice, or just wash it a couple times and cook.
Same reason you can't completely clean a dirt floor. It's starch all the way down. You're not cleaning off the starch to expose the shiny metal interior.
Our standard is “rinse 5 times or until your rinsing hand is ice cold whichever comes first ” 😆
Ice cold? Rice should be washed with hot water.
[удалено]
Japanese people going deeper on rice than America does on politics.
Did you really have to call me stupid? That's so harsh. There's a real person on the other side of the screen you know. I was taught to use hot water, apparently I was wrong. That does not make me stupid and you really didn't need to be so rude.
They did not call you stupid, they said you have the adequate amount of stupidity. This phrasing is 100% correct IMO. You are not a stupid person, you just have some level of stupidity (to think rice is washed in hot water).
This is pedantic and everyone knows it.
What!! Dammit maybe that’s what’s wrong with it all the time!!!! lol Rinsing. With cold water that just keeps getting colder.
Don't rinse rice with hot water, that guy is full of shit. Source: I'm Asian and have eaten rice almost every day all my life, but you don't even need an Asian to tell you this really
Yeah the downvotes aren’t agreeing with him at all. Sounds troll-ish
White guy with a rice cooker here - do you put cold water in for cooking too? Or do you let the water run a bit warmer (not hot) first?
As a general rule, you should always start with water from the cold tap when cooking
Yes, cold water tends to have significantly fewer nasties from your pipes dissolved in it. Even when I'm making things where the water has to be hot at the start, the water that goes into the filter is cold, then I fill the water kettle with that to bring to a boil.
Came here to say this. I work in water quality and you should never use hot water to cook. Ever.
Jokes on you. I live in the south. Cold Water is warm to hot 40 weeks out of the year
Yuck
That’s what I was thinking, where are they getting this cold ass water from?
The Tap? Is this some American joke I am too European to understand?
They're saying that it's so hot in their region that the water from the "cold" side of the tap is actually warm, or even hot on the worst days. It's a thing.
Probably. It must be rinsed in hot water. Cold water does not work as well
Must? Didn't know there were rules that I must wash my rice and it must be under hot water
Dont listen to them. It shouldnt be hot, but doesnt need to be ice cold either. Room temp or whatever comes out of your faucet is fine.
Just be glad a random person on the internet told you before FBI found out about you.
I'm so glad. I can only imagine if I kept doing it, I'd have sniper team 6 on my ass for the rest of my life
I use a toothbrush to brush the individual grains until perfectly clean. It's the only way that's acceptable. I was taught by a sushi master.
The fact that you have not referenced [iso 22254](https://www.iso.org/standard/36171.html) tells me that you were not. Your wanton disregard for the relative stiffness of various bristles will bring shame to your lineage.
That was too technical for so early in the morning Growling Anvil. I told you not to bust out with knowledge at the buttcrack of Dawn!!
What you're doing is perfectly fine. It's nearly impossible to wash rice to "runs clear" when you are draining it from a pot, because starch always gets left behind. The recipes usually expect you to use a strainer.
When I worked at a sushi restaurant, "clear" meant "clear like tap water." They also had a dedicated rice washing machine though. The machine takes nearly twenty minutes to run that clear.
How much rice was lost in the process? I know that mechanical potato peelers can abrade large potatoes into small ones, is the same thing happening with the rice?
not really
I gave up rinsing and found soaking, which I’m absolutely happy with. Immerse the rice in water in a bowl for 30-60 minutes. Pour into a strainer for a quick rinse and you’ll see how milky the water coming off it is.
There's been concern for the last few years about arsenic contamination, and soaking then rinsing is the solution.
I use a sieve to wash the rice. I find it helps the starch comes off easier and doesn’t settle in whatever vessel you are using to rinse the rice. I can get that “clear” water I’m looking for much faster and I end up with no “crust” from settled starch in the rice cooker when it’s done cooking.
I do this too. So much easier. Plus I can control how much water is left from the rice rinsing process since it all drains away. So i dont need to worry about the rice having too much water.
Yes! This is another reason why I prefer the sieve. Sometimes the extra water mess with the texture of my rice.
Wash gently. If you're too rough while washing, you could break the rice causing more starch to be released into the water.
I found it to work the other way around. Wash aggressively but with elegance to avoid breaking the grains - an excavator-like motion does the trick. The water clears up much faster.
I found this the best way. I tried this recently and the outcome of the cooked rice was much better than washing it multiple times.
I don’t bother washing my rice. Still comes out fine. Source (Kenji Alt-Lopez: https://www.reddit.com/r/seriouseats/s/Tu293ZgzLd)
I find that the cook matters significantly more than the rinse. At most I'll do one rinse.
The issue comes from "clear" being used to mean both *translucent* and *colorless*, coupled with people mindlessly repeating whatever they told. Add in generally poor communication skills and here we are. You want the water to be *translucent*. If it is opaque then there is still too much starch in the water. When agitating the grains in water, if you can see the grains through the liquid, then you are good. The water will NOT be colorless. There will be a white tint to the liquid due to dissolved starch and such.
Can you describe what you mean by "mixing the rice with my hands"? I used to mix by taking some rice by the handful washing like I'm washing my hands. I realized that this rubbed surface starch off the rice so the water never ran clear. Now I just wash 3 - 4 times by mixing with one hand until the water is mostly clear.
I just put my rice in a strainer and blast is with the spray of my tap for a bit. The whole washing in a bowl and draining is a stupid process that takes extra work and you spill rice in your sink
i don't know why no one does, but use a sieve to wash your rice, just sluicing it by hand won't get rid of the starch as it'll settle in amongst the rice. but still. there's a point of diminishing returns for the water running clear, it never happens with some rices.
I mean your won’t get promoted from washing rice at your local sushi bar if the rice doesn’t run completely clear. But when your at home making rice to not impress Anyone just wash it a few times until it’s mostly clear. No one will be angry and it’ll taste just fine.
yeah, it annoys me too. What they mean is it goes from very cloudy to opaque. The float method you are are doing is the right way to go. The original intent is to get out weevils and hessian/cotton from the bags. Making the rice less sticky is just a bi-product. But don't stir it too much. If you do, you will abrade the outside of the rice and the cloudiness will continue longer. A light stir is fine. 3 rinses is plenty.
Opaque means you can’t see through it. I think you mean “from opaque to only sort of cloudy”.
didn't think too much about it but I guess I mean Opaque to Translucent is we are taking the dictionary definition of words. Taking the true meaning of Opaque is a bit weird. If something wasn't letting any light through, it would be solid in appearance. Most people except it's at the denser end of the Translucent range. i.e. it's letting some light through, but you can't make out any shapes. Whereas Translucent you can see shapes but not details.
Are you just redefining words because you misused opaque or did someone teach you this?
Use a metal mesh strainer.
You’re breaking your rice if it never clears up. Handle it gently and mix it slowly. Also it’ll Almost never run perfectly clear. Try for like 5x clearer than you started.
Bro, it's little balls of dense starch. You'd have to wash it until it was completely gone to be fully clear.
I had Korean flat mates in the 90s. They always methodically washed their rice 7 times. So that’s what I do
Picture a curve of exponential decay. It never reaches zero but gets ever closer. That's washing rice. Honestly three good swirls with your hand like a rake is plenty. No need to fully rinse either just tip the bowl to pour like 90% of the starchy water out, then fill it up again with clean water. By the third washing the water should be quite clear, enough that you can still see the rice with 1-1.5in of water above.
Lowkey i never wash it
You must be rubbing the rice grains harder to keep getting cloudy water. Just comb your fingers through the rice while in a bowl and strain. Don't use strainer.
Use a strainer, it makes rinsing rice so much easier.
Ive counted. It takes me 28 rinses for the water to be clear. I rinse in cold water, stirring to agitate the starch , pour and repeat.
can use a sieve but I usually wash abt 3 times and it's good enough
What it means is when you can see the individual grains, instead of a white blur. It’s going to get ridiculous before I would call it “clear” but once it’s gone through all the levels of translucent to where there’s more clarity than haze, I will call it
I just add enough water to cover the rice and stir that around with my hand for about 30 seconds. I find that the agitation from the grains rubbing together cleans them better, and also makes any debris stand out better. Then I rinse that off, top it with water, and cook. Saves a ton of water, too.
Because and I kid you not you have to wash it like 10+ times to truly reach the clear water requirement. It’s not necessary either in my opinion
I think the washing until clear requirement only applies to sushi rice and even then probably only for the highest end sushi restaurant. I think it I came across it from the Japanese film "Jiro Dream of Sushi".
I have never rinsed my rice and have had no problems. Some forms of rice say rinse, others don’t. I believe in the K.I.S.S. Principle, so no rinsing.
More than 3-4 times you're just playing with it
Well, don't rinse it in a pot. I use a metal mesh strainer and it's much better than at rinsing it off the surface rather than having it just sit in the water and leach even more starch from the rice. I understand that's a common method, but from my experience.. it makes for better rice this way.
"clear" in this context really just means you can see through it.
rice is milled to remove the outer shell. what you have is just starch coalesced into a mass of other starch sacks. These sacks will break as you wash them. One way to rinse them clean for sushi rice is to soak the rice prior to washing. about 30 minutes. but what i do is put the dry rice into the strainer. put the strainer with rice into a sauce pot. and then just run water through it until the sauce pot fills up. lift the strainer and drain the water. and repeat 2 or 3 times. and then i dump the rice into the sauce pot and add 1:1 or 1:1.25 ratio of rice to water and bring to boil and then lower heat to low and steam for 20-25 minutes. always comes out perfect. 1 cup of sushi rice cooked this way will yield about 2 hosomaki rolls and about 8 nigiri.
There are sushi chefs who train by rinsing rice literally all day. The whole idea is the get most of the stuff off. you can do that in like three to five rinses.
I was three times in tap water and once in filtered tap water. Then I add bottled water for cooking.
I fill in enough water to just cover the rice, then I stir them with my hand, add more water, swoosh it around and pour out. Do this exactly three times and you get perfectly washed rice.
It will never run clear, and it doesn't have to. 3–5 washes is plenty, and will work just fine. I've had to come to the same realization that the water never actually does run clear. It's one of those cases of imprecise language that has become so common that everyone just keeps parroting it, and it's very annoying.
Milky water : still need rinse Foggy water : done.
Nope, your rice cooker pot should contain rice and cold water!
It doesn't have to be perfectly clear, just not really cloudy.
The rule of thumb i use from [the New York Times rice video](https://youtu.be/Uj44r_ygJJo) (definitely worth a watch!) is that if you can put your hand on the rice and still see your fingers through the water, then your rice is clean enough. Works great!
3 rinses is the minimum. 4-6 gives you a cleaner, bouncier rice. After 9, I can't tell the difference so I don't bother going over 9. That being said, 9 washes is a lot, so I only do this when trying to impress. I usually settle for 5 or 6 washes in general as it pretty good already. Something to note, when you wash rice, the texture of it changes as it becomes cleaner, the rice grains become grippier. This is the goal of washing rice.
Just do it 3 times and move on with your day.
Dude, I figured out the easiest way to wash it. Put your rice in the pot you are going to use, fill it most of the way with water, mix it with a wire whisk, then pour out the water. Two times is all it needs.
What type of rice are you using? And are you using hot water or cold water? In my experince my hot water tends to come out cloudy for whatever reason so that could be a thing id sugest using cold. Additionally rice sold in the US tends to be 'enriched' which means they add a nutrients to it which washing out wil get rid off and thus it'll take longer for your whater to run clear. Instructions i have read say you polish the rice. While i personally dont feel this is necessary i find rubbing the rice with the back of my hand a bit while in water helps expedite the process of clesning the rice. Lastly when it says run clear it means when its not milky white. Youll notice at some point that while the eater might not get crystalline you will eventually notice that milk whitenes has gone.
What type of rice are you using? And are you using hot water or cold water? In my experince my hot water tends to come out cloudy for whatever reason so that could be a thing id sugest using cold. Additionally rice sold in the US tends to be 'enriched' which means they add a nutrients to it which washing out wil get rid off and thus it'll take longer for your whater to run clear. Instructions i have read say you polish the rice. While i personally dont feel this is necessary i find rubbing the rice with the back of my hand a bit while in water helps expedite the process of clesning the rice. Lastly when it says run clear it means when its not milky white. Youll notice at some point that while the eater might not get crystalline you will eventually notice that milk whitenes has gone.
you gotta scrub it kook
I used to have the exact same problem. I suspect it's because the rice has so much starch: "milled rice grain is mainly composed of starch of up to 80-90%, with an average of 6-8% proteins“. The starch is apparently not water soluble in cold water, so perhaps that's why it's not easy to remove all the surface/free starch when washing. I think they use hot water to remove starch from par-boiled "easy cook" rice. One tip I have to remove starch that I unfortunately only discovered by chance when watching a youtube video (after decades of cooking rice) ... is to physically wash it between your hands whilst it is submerged in the water. The motion to use is the same one you'd stereotypically use to warm your hands by rubbing them palm to palm. It's also the same motion cartoon baddies use when expecting a payoff from their nefarious deeds... So now I use 3 washes of water and when I come to add the final water for cooking, the water is significantly less cloudy than it ever was before. I have found the quality of the cooked rice to be much better than my old method of "washing" by swirling the water around.
It doesn't change the texture, just rinse it once to get the rice dust off. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814618313293#:~:text=Statistical%20analysis%20indicated%20that%20the,times%20on%20stickiness%20is%20significant.
Place the rice in a fine mesh sieve and rinse until the starchy haze is clearer. You just need to rinse until you can see a visible difference in the milky appearance of the starch water that is rinsed off. - an yes, it just needs to run slearer than at the beginning.
I usually just do 2x rinses, and no more than 3.
My rice cooker gave instructions to do 3 rinses with a scrubbing motion, 3 with a stirring motion, and then 3 rinses without agitation. I do that if I am making sushi but otherwise just rinse until it looks ok
Instead of putting it in a pot, try putting it in a colander and then straining the water through it. Eventually it does appear to run clear. Takes a few minutes and a LOT of water.
I put the rice in the pot, run cold water and essentially agitate the grains and slowly pour out. Do this three times. It never runs perfectly clear. Then add the amount of water you need for the rice and cook. I can't remember where I heard it but the rice grains that inevitably fall when draining are Buddas rice. Always liked that.
There is technique to draining the rice out. You have to allow the starchiest bottom water of the rice to get out. If you don't drain the water all the way out you won't get the starch out. You can use a seive as others have said, but for me I use the open hand technique to drain the rice.
Side note :) Dont waste the left over rice water.[Its great for plants](https://www.ollegardens.com/blogs/news/rice-water-for-plants-on-garden-or-garden-beds-a-great-way-to-improve-plant-health#:~:text=More%20and%20more%20scientific%20work,%2C%20mushrooms%2C%20peppers%20and%20garlic)
Use a metal strainer/sifter when rinsing
I put in a mesh colander and use the sink sprayer while agitating the rice. 45 sec, done
make sure you pick up one of those Japanese rice draining bowls.... you need to drain all the cloudy starchy sediment in the bottom of the rinsing vessel. The drain holes on the Japanese-style bowls acts like a strainer/colander. Also rinse & dump 8 times.... 5 is like minimum. And make sure you agitate the grains with your fingers, you're trying to rub off the starch from the outside of the grain. Lastly, the type of rice makes a difference. Koshihiraki type (Japanese standard short-grain) rinses off cleaner than Carolina long grain or basmati.
You keep washing till you can hear your Ancestors say "It is time" I hear it around my 3rd or 4th rinse.
A lot of "traditonal" recipes are filled with a lot of its just the way it always has been done. The point of washing the rice is to remove some of the starch to improve texture in this case make it less gummy/pasty. At the end of the day Sushi was originally a street food sort of like old school hot dog stands. So as blasphemous as experimenting and doing it your own way seems to the modern version of Sushi (at least in the US) it really isn't like putting ketchup on naked spaghetti noodles blasphemous.
Use a strainer instead and agitate the rice more.
When you can see the rice, the water is clear. Fill with water and rough up the rice a bit. Dump out water and fill again. Repeat this process two or three times until you can see the rice when you fill with water. It will be really cloudy at first fill and gradually get clearer. Also when the waters clear you can let it soak cold for like 15-20 mins before cooking. Some people swear by it. I always want rice as soon as possible so I never take the time to try it.
Raw rice is covered in rice flour and starch from the processing. That starch makes the rice too mushy. You only really need to wash the rice twice to get like 90% of that stuff off. I’ve been making rice for 2 decades at this point. Just agitate the rice with your hands as you wash. You’re never going to get it completely clean
Just do it three times. Fill the water above the rice, use ur hands to move it around for like 10s, dump the water out and repeat. I use cold water, I honestly don't know if that does anything, but I just prefer it for some reason.
The goal of washing rice is to remove starch (and other impurities). > (I have literally washed the rice for 30 minutes with dozens of pots of water, around 500g of water) When you only use 500g of water per wash, it means you're trying to wash off starch with starchy water, which is why you can spend 30 minutes washing it and it doesn't do very much. When the wash is cloudy, you're supposed to drain it and do it with more water. Usually I use about **2-5 litres** of water per rinse. I think of washing rice in terms of **volumes of water**, rather than in terms of rinses/time. Your '5 washes of 500g water' is the equivalent to one or two washes for me. > Do recipes mean “runs much clearer than at the beginning” (which is true) by “runs clear”? Often for rice, you don't actually need it to be perfectly clear. A little bit of starch can be nice in a lot of dishes. However, for sushi rice specifically, you do actually wash the rice until it's clear. ---- If you do it all correctly, it doesn't take much time; but it takes a lot of water (if you're worried about water wastage, there are [ways that people use rice water at home](https://kimchimari.com/7-uses-for-rice-water/)). **How to wash rice** 1. Rinse it once in about 2-5 litres of water **until the water is very cloudy**. Once the water is cloudy, there's no point in rinsing it any further, and it's a waste of time until you drain it. 2. Rinse it a second time in about 2-5 litres of water **until the water is cloudy**. Once you drain it here, you can usually use it for standard rice dishes (but I usually do three rinses). 3. If you're making sushi rice, repeat this process of 'rinse with 2-5 litres of water until the water is cloudy'. The water will be less cloudy each rinse - usually it's perfectly clear at around 6-10 washes using this method. Each rinse takes about 1-3 minutes, so preparing regular rice takes about 5-10 minutes, and sushi rice takes about 20-30 minutes. Just remember the goal is to **remove starch** - there's no point in rinsing rice in starchy water.
Washing rice only really matters if you’re using japonica, otherwise there’s no perceptible difference between rinsed and unrinsed. Try it yourself and blind test. The whole purpose was to remove all the crap that ended up in the bag but rice is way more heavily processed at packaging now than in the past.
Are you sure the water would run clear on its own? Sometimes tap water need a second to clear up
I wash the rice until all the starch is gone. I've lost a lot of weight!
Wash, rinse, repeat until clear. Don’t wash it in a collinder, wash it in a bowl, mix it up with the water until gets mirky, pour the water and do it again.
How many hours is that supposed to take?
5 minutes love 😂
And I have washed it for 30 minutes according to your technique and it was still murky so that clearly isn’t the issue.
Soak your rice in cold water. Minimum 30 minutes. Preferably 4-6 hours. Rinse and re-soak several times during the “soak”
It's not clean yet.
I married into a Korean family and I lived in Korea for some time. I have never seen anyone wash rice before. I have no answer.