I always laugh when I hear Alton Brown and his followers declare, as an absolute, No single purpose kitchen gadgets! When did this become a law? There are many of us who don’t put up such barriers to happiness. There are many of us who go overboard and do have too many toys in the kitchen, but I’ve got bigger things to worry about. Alton Brown, you’re not the boss of me!
Of course my love of clay pot cooking is well documented and after several months, I’m still smitten with my clay rice cooker from Japan. The Kamado-san makes rice an event. It’s a little more of a bother than a rice cooker or cooking stovetop in a pan, but for me it’s worth it.
White rice is the easiest and only requires minimal soaking. But for brown rice, author Naoko Takei Moore, in her seminal book, Donabe: Classic and Modern Japanese Clay Pot Cooking
I don’t know if there’s more perfect rice to be had. Of course, new crop whole grain brown rice from Massa Organics makes a huge difference.
I remember my father serving buttered rice as a side dish. Actually, it was probably margarine (it was the 1970s, please forgive him) but the rice was always brown. I made a small bowl of brown rice and butter last night and I can see serving this myself. It was delicious.
Massa Organics Whole Grain Brown Rice at Rancho Gordo (Available in March only)
What was the deal with margarine in the 70s?? Why did we eat that stuff when we could have had butter?
Re: margarine: I think it was supposed to have healthy vegetable oils, while butter had all that nasty cholesterol-producing animal fat. Can’t recall – just that my mother, who was a registered dietician, used margarine exclusively. So it must have been thought to be better for you, somehow.
But as a result, I can still remember (when I was a graduate student) the first time I heated up some butter to cook something and smelled that wonderful, wonderful aroma….I try to keep my fats down in general, but the sticks in my fridge are all butter. Probably wouldn’t appreciate it near as much if I’d eaten it all my life.
And as to unitaskers – _some_ of us have teeny kitchens, with a minimum of storage space. But I do have a donabe pot…and since my rice cooker has died, I will have to give this a shot. Especially the soaking. I don’t eat as much brown rice as I should, because I hate to wait the additional half-hour for it to cook.
Margarine was used back during world war 2 because butter was rationed. I guess people didn’t give it up until they found out how bad it was for them. I remember having to stir the orange die into the white margarine for my mother so that it would look like butter. We didn’t know how bad it was for us. I only use organic butter now.
You’re right! I had forgotten the no animal fat thing (to be replaced by the no trans fat thing). I had a subscription to Cooking Light in the 90s and it was all margarine all the time.
It seems a remission not to credit macrobiotic techniques for cooking brown rice & use their of the Ohsawa pot. http://shop.goldminenaturalfoods.com/OHSAWA-POT-LARGE/productinfo/7090-1004/
like beans, new rice tastes the best and cooks faster than old rice. in Japan, as soon as new rice hits the stores, overnight the old rice in the stores are sold at discount. same goes for green tea which releases fresh fragrance. Japanese are seasonally sensitive to what and how they eat.
Margarine became popular when President Eisenhower had a heart attack and the country freaked out about saturated fats. Of course, those were also the days when ‘doctors’ used to appear in advertisements for filtered cigarettes.
I’ve noticed that you use your clay pots on a gas stove which seems to work. I’m stuck with an electric stove. Any tips for using clay on it?
I use a butane table top burner. It works perfect for my donabes. They cost about $30.00 and butane cartridges cost about $10 for a four pack. The setting on the burn I use after ignition is between low and off. This works great for when I make rice.
No donabe but just roughly followed this with some massa in a mica clay pot. It was so good