Power to the Pilaf - Recap

Aboard an airplane at 18,000 feet, Alton ponders rice. About two thirds of the world’s population eats rice any give day. The grain is nutritious, delicious, versatile, economical and even hypoallergenic. But most Americans don’t know pilaf fro paella or Texmati from Arborio. To them rice remains mysterious. Alton, “doggedly determined to correct all culinary conundrums,” aims to correct this lack.

Alton starts at the International Rice Festival in Crowley, Louisiana, and Hoppe Farms with a little history. Experts believe rice cultivation started in the Korat region of Thailand sometime around 5000 BC. They know the Chinese cultivated rice as long ago as 2800 BC because records exist from that time describing it. By the fourth century BC the Indians were shipping rice to Greece. From there the grain found its way to Persia and Africa where it did well in the veldts. It took more centuries before rice found its way to America, but in 1625 a galleon bound for Madagascar limped into Charleston, South Carolina. A local planter rendered assistance and the captain rewarded him with a small bag of golden seeds. Rice thrived in the Carolina lowlands but the muddy fields could not support machinery, so hand labor was needed. Rice, not cotton, began the plantation era and the slave trade. The African slaves imported to do the work also knew the plant from centuries of experience in their homeland, and by the early 1800’s about fifty thousand tones of Carolina Gold rice passed through Charleston every year. Carolina Gold was considered one of the finest examples of rice in the world.

Soon enough planters discovered that the low river areas around Louisiana could support both rice and the machinery to cultivate it. Today America’s rice grows in Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, Louisiana and California.

Alton tours a mill next. There he sees how machinery removes the husk to make brown rice, and how bran is polished off brown rice to make white rice. A laser sorts out the broken bits. He also visits rice cooking demonstrations, a rice eating contest and a rice threshing contest. And he seeks the answer to the elusive question: why is rice light and fluffy one day, but a solid block the next?

Back in his kitchen Alton unrolls a storage box to reveal varieties of rice. There are thousands, ranging from Himalaya basmati grains to sticky rice from Japan, Arborio rice from Northern Italy and Thailand’s Jasmine rice, with the aroma of basmati at a lower cost. There is the Valencia of Spain, wehani, Texmati, wild rice (actually an aquatic grass) and even regular white rice.

It comes down to two questions: how long is the grain, and how was it processed. Rice varieties divide into three basic grain lengths. Alton starts with very short grain Asian rice, which cooks sticky and works well for sushi or with chopsticks. This rice is also called sweet or glutinous rice. Medium grain yields starch to the cooking liquid, which suits it for risotto and rice pudding. The starch in this sort of rices doesn’t crystallize, so Alton recommends it for cold salads. Finally there is long grain rice, the sort most Americans know. The grains are four to six times longer than they are wide. This rice doesn’t surrender starch to the cooking liquid as do the other sorts, so it yields fluffy, dry grains. Long grain works well in many dishes, except cold dishes. Its starch crystallizes when it cools, although it may be reheated and it will loosen again; for that reason it works well for twice cooked applications such as fried rice.

Threshing, Alton advises, removes the husk from rice, leaving brown rice. The brown color comes from the bran that surrounds the white endosperm; this brown layer contains many nutrients and yields a nutty flavor, but brown rice takes three times as long to cook and requires three times the water. When the bran is milled off the result is white rice. White rice keeps for years in an airtight container but brown rice contains oil and oil becomes rancid. Alton solves the problem by putting his brown rice in a Ziploc bag and squeezing as much air out as possible. Then he puts that in a sealed container and stashes it in the freezer, where it will keep for a year or two.

Alton contemplates the rice he’s made, poking dispiritedly at it with a spoon. The congealed mess sticks to pot, spoon and lid. “Dang!” says Alton as he dumps the mistake into the dog dish. Then he heads to a rendezvous with W, his equipment expert, for a lesson on rice cookers.

W tells Alton that rice cookers range from simple buckets to a “fuzzy logic” model and all of them cook rice flawlessly because they know something the cook can never know: when the water is absorbed. When the last of the water is absorbed the temperature inside the pot begins to rise; a sensor detects this and warns the user that the rice is cooked, switching (usually) to a keep warm setting. Alton takes few cookers back to the kitchen for tests. The tests show that all of them do an excellent job, so Alton recommends those who cook a lot of rice, have the $50 - $100 to spare as well as counter or cabinet space will benefit from a rice cooker.

Rice cookers have their limitations. They can’t make a risotto or a pilaf because these require multiple cooking steps. Pilaf (from a word that means “rice dish”) can be Velcro for all those leftovers: a wide variety of ingredients work well in a pilaf. Alton gathers green peas, onion, a red bell pepper, some orange zest, bay leaves, and some chicken stock. And a secret ingredient – to fetch it, Alton dials the digits on his kitchen safe, and removes from that lock box a few strands of saffron that he blooms in hot water.

One of the two secrets to pilaf is heat management. Alton starts his pilaf on the stove and finishes it in a 350º oven. On the stovetop Alton melts a little butter and then adds the onion, pepper, a few pinches of salt and stirs to coat. His goal is to sweat these aromatics until they turn clear but stopping before they brown. And that brings Alton to the second secret: the correct ratio of rice to liquid. Alton disdains the 2:1 ratio called for on most packages, claiming the proportion of rice to water goes down the more rice one cooks:

• 1 cup of rice requires 1½ cups of water.
  
• 2 cups of rice require 2¾ cups of water.
  
• 3 cups of rice require 3½ cups of water.
  

When the aromatics are done sweating Alton adds the rice and stirs to coat, turning up the heat to caramelize some of the sugars on the outside of the kernel. He cooks the rice like this until he starts to smell nuts. Then he adds the liquid: first the hot water (now a rich gold color) that bloomed the saffron and then sufficient tap water to make the correct ratio. Then he adds bay leaves, orange zest and salt. Rice must be cooked with salt; salt added later will never taste right. Alton adds enough salt to make the cooking liquid taste like sea water. He turns the heat up high to bring the mixture to a boil. When it boils he stirs it once and once only! He covers the pan with a barely moist dish towel and covers that with the lid, then pops that into the oven for fifteen minutes.

While that bakes Alton visits a field where fall flowering crocus grow. These blooms each sport three tiny threads called stigma; these threads are saffron. If one picked above five infields worth of threads one would have a pound of saffron with a value of around a thousand dollars. Saffron has been for decades the most expensive food on Earth. Solid red threads are Kashmir saffron, the best variety. Spanish and Turkish saffron may contain up to 10% yellow threads and have a less intense flavor. A very little goes a long way: Alton used just about a quarter’s worth in his pilaf. Finally, Alton recommends purchasing the spice from a spice vendor; one never knows how long saffron has been sitting on store shelves. And saffron breaks down quickly in the presence of light and oxygen. Never settle for crushed or powdered saffron; these sorts are usually cut with tumeric. Alton keeps his saffron in a heavy airtight plastic bag, or a jar with an airtight lid. The safe, he says, is optional.

After fifteen minutes Alton removes his pilaf from the oven but leaves the lid alone. Fight the urge, he cautions, to open that lid for at least ten minutes. Fifteen or even twenty would be better. Then turn it out into a serving plate. Don’t stir! The starch is still unstable and sticky. Fluff if desired with a serving fork and remove the bay leaves and orange zest – they have made their contribution. At this point Alton adds his peas – remember them? The rice is plenty warm enough to heat them. Raisins or chopped pistachios work well too.

Rice is a natural product and not every pot will be the same. Alton offers some suggestions in the event the dish doesn’t turn out exactly as planned. If the rice is watery Alton suggests draining it and putting it on a sheet pan in the oven for five minutes. If it’s underdone, add a half cup of hot water, slap on the lid and let the steam cook it the rest of the way. If it’s gooey, gummy or mushy – feed it to the dog or make rice pudding!

History, versatility, cultural significance... Alton says he has barely cracked the book on rice. He summarizes the high points of this episode: short is sticky, long is fluffy, white cooks quicker than brown. Nutritionally, brown rice beats converted rice which beats white rice. And as a coda, Alton points out that all cultures consider rice a symbol of fertility, which is why it is thrown at weddings instead of, say, corncobs, small watermelons, or fish!

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