While brown rice, with its numerous health benefits, has an obvious nutritional leg up on white rice, it also has one undeniably huge drawback: it takes a lot longer to cook. Thankfully, you can cook brown rice much faster if you're willing to do a little prep early on.
All you have to do to speed up brown rice's cook time is to soak it the night before. We stumbled upon this useful tip in a 1991 New York Times article by Marian Burros:
To cut down on the cooking time for brown or wild rice, soak it overnight. For brown rice, the water-to-rice ratio is 2 to 1. For wild rice, cover with a generous amount of water, several inches above the rice. Soak the rice in a covered pot and keep in the refrigerator about six hours or overnight.
The result trims brown or wild rice's cook time from more than 45 minutes to 20 minutes or less. Sure, you have to plan a bit ahead, but the technique comes with an added benefit: soaking whole grains helps reduce their content of phytic acid, an enzyme inhibitor that prevents minerals from being absorbed by the body.
Eating Well | The New York Times
Photo by Dhanyam Organic Superstore.
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