Cooked Rice In A Saucepan

Twice. And it turned out okay.

What led me to my stove were a couple of clips of Puerto Rican streamers reacting not too favourably to Gordon Ramsay's "pegao-cooking" segment.

A rice dish made in a saucepan. No discernible difference
between what comes out of a rice-cooker.

What Puerto Ricans call pegao is the crust of crispy, brown-in-places rice at the bottom of a pot - probably a rare treat in some homes these days with the advent of modern cooking tools and techniques.

And if the crust resulted from, say, the cooking of claypot rice, fuiyoh. Crispy, fragrant caramelised flavourtown.

This substance is also familiar to other cultures where rice is a staple. The Vietnamese call it cơm cháy, Iranians have tahdig, in Japan it's okoge, nurungji in Korea, and in Indonesia and perhaps Malaysia it's called kerak nasi. The Chinese have guōbā, but the Cantonese call it faan jiu.

Though most of these are a by-product of conventional rice-cooking, sometimes this scorched rice is deliberately created, as might be the case with cơm cháy, guōbā and nurungji.

But then comes this white dude with his idea of scorched rice: pressing cooked rice into a piping-hot frying pan and searing it until it's "crispy", melts butter down the sides of the pan to make it easier to come out, then taps it out onto a plate when it's done.

One of the streamers I linked noted that rather than pegao (a derivative of pegado or "stuck" in Spanish), what Ramsay had made more closely resembled arroz mamposteao. Given Ramsay's reputation, we can acknowledge that his version won't suck - far from it - but it's not what he said it was.

I can only assume that the making of bona fide pegao wasn't enough to showcase the Michelin-starred chef's moves, and he didn't get the memo about what he ended up cooking.

I guess what I'm trying to do here is burn away the shame from getting carried away by a comedian's indignant, low-brow one-note act. The guy is still harping on Jamie Oliver, recently over Thai green curry.

This time, I noticed the energy Oliver radiated in that segment, and others before. This is a bloke who has nothing left to prove, is SO DONE being judged, and is now winging it for all the joy in the world. "Not authentic"? Go elsewhere.

Doesn't look that nice now, but when mixed together...

So I cooked rice in a saucepan. Rice, almonds, cashews and sunflower seeds were followed by thawed-out mixed frozen veg and mashed tinned sardines when the rice looked half-cooked. A good thing about an electric stove is the built-in timer and off switch.

I was concerned that I'd screw up and burn the rice, as I can't remember doing this before. However, only several per cent of the rice was glued to the bottom, nicely dried but not too charred, because I turned down the heat earlier.

I had to keep an eye on the pan until it boiled. A rice cooker is not completely covered by design even if the lid is on, so that extra steam can escape, but it still doesn't prevent spills from boil-over starchy water.

Once the rice started boiling, I waited a bit before adding the rest of the ingredients. After that, I waited a bit longer before lowering the heat and letting it simmer and steam away.

The results didn't taste too different from how I normally cook rice these days: steaming it in a steel bowl propped up by a steaming rack and a bit submerged in boiling water inside a rice cooker. This was a tip from Twitter for single-portion rice cooking that emerged during the first MCO, and it has served me well since.

The next day, I repeated this with a tin of Yeo's beef curry and roughly diced carrot. The resulting "pegao" was spicy as well as savoury, albeit low in volume. In both cases, the flavour reminded me of rice crackers.

But oh, wow, getting it out of the pan was tough. I broke a spoon made of a rice husk compound - a good spoon! RIP - to extract the crust because I didn't want to scrape the bottom with a metal utensil. Considering that the pan is stainless steel, I probably shouldn't have been so delicate about it.

The aftermath of saucepanned rice #2, after the rice grains
were scraped off. Hard work, but worth it.

I have concerns over using a claypot on my glasstop ceramic stove, so for now this is a viable alternative when I'm in the mood for a one-pot meal, made in a pot.

Some would say that it won't be like how it's made in a claypot, but that's okay. With the pandemic changing our relationship with our kitchens (I love you, kitchen!) and our regard for hawker food and outside dining (OMG you're all heroes!), some things need to be re-evaluated.