25. Oven-Baked Brown Rice

Date Cooked: October 3rd, 2008
Page: 215
Rating: C

It has been a very busy Thanksgiving weekend and I anticipate that the next few months will be equally busy as I dive into a home renovation project. But we still need to eat and I still love to cook so this blog will continue! But enough excuses, lets start from where we last left off.

Ah, the comfort of cooking basics. I love rice and it is my favorite starch but I’ve never cooked brown rice before. I was always under the impression that it was tougher to cook and since there was no plain instant version of brown rice, well there are the prepackaged flavor versions that my Uncle Ben makes but I always find those a little bit oily and the rice always tastes undercooked, no matter how long they get cooked. If cooking non-instant rice was a challenge for me I could only imagine how this was going to turn out.

In order to build up a good base for making excuses I did tackle this when I was preparing two other dishes which required a lot more of my attention. So with that said let’s begin. Are you ready for the read of your life? Are you sitting down? Are you sure you can handle the thrill that is oven-baked brown rice?

I put the rice in a ceramic baking dish. I added boiling oil, water and salt. I baked for 1 hour. I fluffed the rice and let it sit covered with a kitchen towel. I let it sit uncovered. I served and ate. That was pretty intense wasn’t it? Wait… did I just type boiling oil? What is this, the dark ages and I am defending my kitchen from invading hordes of barbarians. I may be a bad cook but believe me I boiled water, not oil. Although if I had boiled oil I can assure you this post would have been EXCITING!

Cooking brown rice was actually pretty boring and the result was… equally boring. It was also a little overcooked but that is most likely because I am still trying to figure out the cooking time/temperature adjustments I need to make when using my convection oven. I actually prefer the white rice preparation that I have been cooking from the book. It has much more flavor and is quicker to make. Plus, it uses the stove top so I am not tying up my oven for a rather blasé rice dish. All that said I look forward to trying the other brown rice recipe variations in the book as I am sure an infusion of flavor can only improve upon this.

Rating: C. Nothing inspiring here and I am actually unlikely to make this dish as is again. There is just no real need to spend an hour baking a boring, low flavor dish.