How to Spice Up Your Rice (AKA Adding Flavor to White Rice)

To quote the late, great Mitch Hedberg, “Rice is great when you’re hungry and want two thousand of something.” 

If you’re like us, then you’ve probably made rice the following way quite a bit: combine equal parts rice and water, throw it into a cheap rice cooker, click the button, wait for a bit, now you have rice (maybe put some soy sauce on it because you are white).

But after a while, plain rice gets plain old boring. So we decided we would investigate ways to make one of the world’s most popular side dishes a bit more interesting. 🍚

Before jumping into this post, we just wanted to clarify that white rice still has its place. It’s a great vehicle for sauces and curries. If you come from a family where your food goes on a plate and it doesn’t touch each other, then this post is for you.

Say nty (no thank you) to boring rice!

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But First… Should You Rinse Your Rice?

On the day of our experiments, we decided to kick things off by making one cup of plain jasmine rice that had been rinsed, and one cup of plain jasmine rice that hadn’t been rinsed to compare. What we found was that the unwashed rice ended up with a very slight mushy and clumpy texture, but it wasn’t the end of the world. We likely wouldn’t have noticed if we weren’t looking for it. Maybe we just got lucky, or perhaps the type of rice we used was more forgiving, but the unwashed rice was perfectly fine.

We decided to reach out to one of our friends and ask for his opinion on washed vs. unwashed rice. His exact words were, “I wouldn’t say it’s blasphemy but knowing what could be in the packages of rice, it’s kind of just gross to not wash it. There is a taste difference in my opinion when you do wash vs not. Washing tastes less starchy and gets more fluffy than not washing from my experience.” 

Contaminants weren’t really something we had thought about, but in retrospect, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Wash your rice, kids.

Different Types of Rice

There are many different types of rice: white, brown, black, wild. Rice can also vary in length and are usually categorized by short and long grain.

Short grain rice is most commonly used for sushi, and you may see it sold in stores as sushi rice. Arborio rice is another short grain rice that is used for dishes such as risotto. Common long grain rice include basmati and jasmine, which are what we used for the recipes below. 

If you look online, people also talk about medium-grain rice. Our conclusion is that there needs to be a governing rice authority, as some sites classify basmati as medium or arborio as medium. We’re just going to cut out the middle term, because obviously everyone is confused about what is what when it comes to rice.

Cooking Rice: Rice Cooker or Pot?

Rice cookers are great and super convenient. Both of us (Brittany and Trevor if you’re new here), own this simple Black & Decker rice cooker. It’s small, doesn’t take up a lot of space, and does the job just fine.

If you want to get fancy and eat rice often, we recommend this Japanese rice cooker our friend has. (It’s A++!)

If you want to brown your rice, or cook aromatics to go in your rice, then you’ll likely end up cooking rice in a pot instead. If you’ve only ever used a rice cooker, never fear. Cooking rice in a pot isn’t rocket science. Follow the package directions/recipe and your rice should turn out just fine. The key to non-crunchy rice is to leave that lid alone. Don’t touch it! Let the steam do its thing.

Making Flavorful White Rice

There are a ton of different ways you can spice up your rice — here are some recipes we made to help you eat better, more flavorful white rice!

Saffron Rice

Saffron is mad expensive in our part of the world. Luckily, we have a Costco near us that sells it at a reasonable price (#notsponsored).

$$$

This saffron rice recipe is really easy to make. All you need to do is grind up half of the saffron, and leave the other half alone (we have no idea why) and let it soak in some hot water for a few minutes.

🍚 Mediocre Tip: If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, an ice cream scoop and a bowl will work just fine in a pinch.

While that’s soaking, fry up the onions and get your rice sorted. Combine everything in a pot with some chicken stock and let it cook.

Honestly, the most complicated part of this recipe is sourcing and paying for saffron threads. Everything else is pretty straightforward.

Garlic Butter Rice

It’s no secret that we love garlic. Garlic is life. If we can incorporate garlic into a dish, we will. If we can add extra garlic, we will.

This garlic butter rice recipe is a great addition to any garlic lover's arsenal of recipes.

We skimped out on the scallions a bit (we won’t next time we make this, promise), and actually followed the amount of garlic it suggested (gasp) because we wanted to see if it would be garlicky enough. It was pretty damn tasty, no extra garlic added! Will we add extra garlic to this next time we make this? Yes. For science.

Garlic is life. (And yes, there are a few garlic chips that are a bit too crispy, see our tip below.)

🍚 Mediocre Tip: Be careful when making the crispy garlic topping! It’s so, so easy to burn garlic. Watch your pan like a hawk. Remove garlic immediately from oil when it is slightly golden. Do not overcook it.

Lemon & Herb Rice

We like lemon, and we like herbs, so lemon herb rice sounds like a pretty solid choice. And it is! But the recipe we tried didn’t quite hit the mark. This lemon herb rice calls for 1 tsp basil and 1 tsp oregano, but this 1:1 ratio wasn’t making our taste buds happy — the oregano was a bit overpowering! 

Next time we’d add a bit more lemon zest, less oregano, and also test adding some other dried herbs such as thyme. Another addition that would be great is fresh chives at the end!

We aren’t professional photographers. 💁‍♀️

Lemon and herbs are a great addition to rice, experiment with the amount of lemon juice and zest, and try different herbs to make a lemon herb rice that fits your tastes!

Coconut Rice

This recipe is quite possibly the simplest one of the bunch. It also happens to be one that we goofed on a bit. In theory, it’s super simple: put the rice, coconut milk, and some water in a rice cooker and you’re good to go. We followed the instructions perfectly, with the only deviation being the amount of water that we added (we also don’t have a fancy rice cooker like the one the recipe calls for). There was no way that our rice cooker would be able to hold all of that liquid. 

The first sign that something was wrong was when the rice cooker clicked over from “Cook” to “Warm” and in place of perfectly cooked rice, we had rice soup. We fought with it for the better part of an hour before we decided to just transfer the rice to a pot and cook it that way.

Somehow it ended up being decent, and we avoided it being an absolute dumpster fire.

Just cook it in a pot if you don’t have a big fancy rice cooker. Or, be smart (we weren’t) and halve the recipe if you think all of the liquid won’t fit in your rice cooker.

Coconut rice is great with curry and also can be a nice change for rice bowls. It also makes a great dessert — you have to make Khao Neeo Mamuang!

Mushroom Rice

This recipe was really, really tasty. The mushrooms add a nice umami element to the rice, and cooking anything with butter, garlic, and onions is always delicious. If you decide to make this recipe we have a few alterations that we recommend trying:

  1. Cook the mushrooms all at once. Once they’re done, remove them and set aside.

  2. Cook the onions in the butter first until they’ve released some of their liquid. Adding onions and garlic at the same time is a good way to burn your garlic.

  3. Use a bit of stock to deglaze the pan before adding the rice. 

  4. Add half the mushrooms back in and then add the rice.

  5. We don’t know what the recipe means when they call for you to toss the reserved mushrooms and scallions in the rice. Are you supposed to mix them in? Just put them on top? We had no idea. We put them on top of the rice and let things steam for 10 minutes and everything turned out great.

All in all, this was a good recipe, albeit slightly more complicated than it had to be.

Of course you could make this with brown or wild rice too.

🍚 Mediocre Tip: When making a recipe, always think about how you can be improving it or simplifying it. It’ll make you a better cook!

Mexican Rice

The rice we made was from Rick Martinez’s cookbook, Mi Cocina. He has a few rice recipes in his cookbook, and we made Arroz Rojo. (In our Authentic Mexican Food post, we made Arroz Blanco con Mantequilla, which is also yummy.)

There are a lot of recipes out there for different styles of Mexican rice. If you want one that’s a rice cooker recipe, give this recipe a try. If you make this recipe, go for chicken broth that isn’t low in sodium, we found that it needed a bit more salt!

If you want to make Rick’s Arroz Blanco, you’ll need onion, carrots, garlic, tomato paste, chicken stock, frozen green peas, and a serrano pepper. (And rice, of course.) This rice will take the longest to make because you have to toast your rice, cook your aromatics, and let it sit for a long time, but in the end you get a delicious side dish!

🍚 Mediocre Tip: If you want more flavor, it’s going to take more effort! Toasting your rice and cooking your aromatics will make a very tasty rice.

A Note About Boxed Rice & Instant Rice

Sure, you could buy these. They’re quick and easy. They taste… alright. (Sometimes really bad though.) You can do better!

Buying a big bag of white rice is way more cost effective than buying Rice a Roni or Ben’s Original. 

More Rice Recipes (But This Time, Meals)

As we’ve covered above, rice is a versatile side dish. But it can also be a main course! Here are some recipes to try:

How to Make Better Rice (tl;dr)

Below is the SparkNotes version of this blog post. (Do kids these days still use that for school?)

  • Rinse your rice if you have time. It’ll make it more fluffy and help the grains remain more separate.

  • Cook your rice in chicken or veggie stock instead of water to impart flavor.

  • Add herbs and spices. Don’t be shy. 

  • Fry up aromatics. Toast your rice. It’s more steps and means not cooking in a rice cooker, but it makes for better rice.

  • G a r l i c

  • Add some bulk with proteins and veggies. Think frozen corn, frozen peas, chicken, ground beef — that sorta thing. 

What’s your favorite way to spice up your rice? What did we miss? Let us know in the comments below!

Vegetarian Recipes, Rice Recipes, How-To'sMediocre ChefComment