The Ultimate Rice Cooker (45 page)
Posole, the spicy New Mexican stew that is based on hominy, is usually a long-simmered dish made with pork or beef. This version is quicker and lighter, yet just as hearty and comforting. Because canned hominy is already cooked, this posole can be ready to eat in less than an hour. The carrots and chayote are not traditional. Two chiles make a slightly spicy version; add more than four at your own risk. Serve in bowls with crusty bread or rolls.
MACHINE: Large (10-cup) rice cooker ;
fuzzy logic or on/off
CYCLE: Regular
YIELD: Serves 8
Two 30-ounce cans white hominy or 4 to 5 cups
Fresh Hominy
2 to 4 large dried New Mexico chiles
1 pound skinless, boneless chicken thighs, trimmed of fat, and cut into bite-size pieces
3 cups chicken stock
2 cups water
1 medium-size onion, sliced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crumbled
2 to 3 carrots, to your taste, sliced
1 medium-size chayote squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into bite-size pieces
¼ cup fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon salt, or more to taste, if needed (depending on saltiness of stock)
1. Coat the rice cooker bowl with nonstick cooking spray. Place the hominy in a colander and rinse with cool water; allow to drain.
2. Meanwhile, rinse the chiles with cool water if they appear dusty. Pull off the stems and shake out most of the seeds.
3. Place the chiles, hominy, chicken pieces, stock, water, onion, garlic, and oregano in the rice cooker bowl. Close the cover, set for the regular cycle, and set a timer for 40 minutes.
4. When the liquid comes to a boil (open the cooker to check if yours doesn’t have a glass lid), add the carrots and chayote. When the timer sounds, the chicken should be cooked through and the vegetables tender. Add the lime juice and salt. Remove the chile pods and discard, or slit open and scrape out the red pulp and return it to the pot, discarding the skins. This dish will hold on Keep Warm for up to 1 hour. Serve hot.
ABOUT OLD-FASHIONED STONE-GROUNDGRITS
Crushed kernels of dried corn with the consistency of coarse sand and a shiny luminescence rather like that of seashells is the best description of grits. They are made from either white or yellow corn, although they both taste quite similar despite the difference in color. Yellow grits look a lot like polenta but are coarser, and polenta is cleaned of all flour and milling dust; you can’t substitute one for the other. Instant grits is a degerminated cereal with its bran and germ sifted out. Out goes the character and taste as well.
When you get a bag of old-fashioned grits, they might be labeled “speckled” on the bag. The black speckles in the yellow are the sign of stone-ground grits, residue from the black base of each kernel. White grits, traditional in the Carolinas, are often flecked with yellow. Some cooks (like us) aren’t bothered by the earthy look of the flecks, while others skim the grits after covering them with water before cooking.
Stone-ground grits can be mail-ordered from southern mills that have been grinding grits since before the Civil War (
see Online and Mail-Order Resources
), as well as some new mills that know a good thing when they taste it. You know the food world is getting wise when
The New
York Times
describes grits as “good alone, with other foods, godly.” Southern cooks have never paid any attention to fashion; they have been in the know for generations.
hot breakfast cereals and PORRIDGES
Old-Fashioned Steel-Cut Oatmeal
Sweet Breakfast Grits with Fresh Fruit
Your Own Old-Fashioned Granola
Triple-Oat Granola with Dried Cranberries
Rice and Sweet Potato Porridge
Savory Rice Porridge with Shiitake and Preserved Egg
Breakfast cereals happen to be the way the majority of people eat whole grains. When grains are cooked in water or milk, they become a porridge, a food that has sustained humans since the first wild grains were gathered. Hot cooked grains are traditional fare the world over. Who could have predicted the long nutritious future of a group of Seventh-Day Adventists who in 1877 touted a vegetarian diet and opened a sanitarium based on the principles of evangelist and whole foods advocate Sylvester Graham? Developing a breakfast cereal of wheat, oats, and cornmeal baked into biscuits and then ground up, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg made the first roughage-rich granola, a name later adopted in the health food–conscious 1960s (mixed and served at the first Woodstock music festival) for a sweetened combination of roasted rolled grains, nuts, and seeds.
Kellogg later cooked grains of wheat and rolled them flat, making the first rolled cereals. Steam-injected puffing guns made whole grains porous and were introduced at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The highly original Minnesota food eccentrics were off and running with the cereal boom. Americans fell in love with cereal and the demand has not diminished to this day. Unfortunately, the ever-growing line of commercial cereals are laced with preservatives and lots of refined sugar products tailored to the tastes of we’re not sure whom.
Recipes for robust, luscious, or austere mixed grain cereals abound and, whether served hot or cold, offer a tasty way to feed your body in the morning. Making your own cereal blends or using leftover cooked grains such as rice is a perfect place to practice improvisation with a dash of kitchen creativity.
The Porridge cycle in the fuzzy logic machines does a beautiful job of cooking a wide variety of whole grains into breakfast porridges. Most of your own special slow-cooked breakfast cereals can be on the table after you finish dressing.
The secret to making excellent porridges is to use very fresh whole-grain cereals, such as rolled oats and bran. Be sure to get residue-free organically-grown whole grains every chance you get for the maximum health benefit. Commercial brands like Arrowhead Mills’ Bear Mush is an excellent alternative to processed farina, and McCann’s imported quick-cooking Irish oats are rolled from whole oats. Look for real old-fashioned rolled oats (as well as barley and wheat flakes) rather than the quick-cooking varieties. We also love old-fashioned hot cereals like Maltex and Wheatena. And although the long-cooking rough-cut steel cut oats—chopped groats known as Irish-cut or Scotch-cut—can be intimidating to cook properly on the stove, they are easy to cook into a creamy cereal with no fuss in the rice cooker. Cracked grain cereal combinations—usually a blend such as cracked wheat, rye, oats, barley, millet, flaxseed, and corn—cook up as beautifully as oatmeal with the slow cooking of a rice cooker.
A key to how cereals will cook is to look at how they were processed. If processed minimally, as is the case for cracked grains, they will need more water (because they must absorb more to soften) and longer cooking times. Processed grains, such as rolled flakes, are first steamed, then passed through rollers to flatten. Some require as little as half the amount of water as cracked grains to cook, and they become a smoother mush. Sometimes, though, they absorb a lot of liquid and you end up with a dry mixture, like rice; just add some more water and cook a bit longer. Make a note on the package for the next time. Toasted flakes, as in granola, absorb less water than the raw flakes. Thick-cut flakes will absorb more water than thinner ones. Whole grains, with their bran and germ intact, cook more slowly and take more water than grains that have been hulled and degermed, the difference, for example, between brown and white rice. Previously cooked grains require the least amount of extra liquid and will break down very quickly.
As with the cooking of all grains, we all have a way we like our cereal cooked: smooth and loose so it is a homogeneous mush, with milk, or a bit stiff, so that the milk is a moat and can be cut into with a spoon. Open the cover and check the consistency of the cereal; give a stir with your wooden or plastic rice paddle. If it looks too stiff, simply add another ¼ to ½ cup of water or milk. If it looks too loose, either set for a second Porridge cycle to continue the cooking (it won’t hurt the mush one bit) or hold the cereal on the Keep Warm cycle for up to two hours before serving. Hot cereals hold perfectly on the Keep Warm cycle.
How to serve your porridge is entirely a matter of personal preference. Dried or fresh fruit can be used as a topping or an ingredient to be cooked with the cereal. If refined sweeteners such as brown sugar are not in your diet, cereals can be made with pure maple syrup, date sugar, or honey. Create a moat of milk, half-and-half, rice milk, soy milk, or oat milk around your hot cereal. Whatever your choice, it’s good morning to you!
We consider this porridge an oatmeal inspiration. It is Beth’s liberal adaptation of a Marie Simmons recipe from her wonderful book
Rice: The Amazing Grain
(Henry Holt and Company, 1991). You can use any leftover white or brown rice, long- or short-grain. An excellent grain combination and a breakfast favorite.
MACHINE: Medium (6-cup) rice cooker ;
fuzzy logic only
CYCLE: Porridge
YIELD: Serves 2
1 cup rolled (old-fashioned) oats (not quick-cooking)
1 cup cooked white or brown rice
2 tablespoons oat bran
2 ¼ cups water
Cold milk or soy milk
Pure maple syrup or honey
3 tablespoons toasted wheat germ
1. Place the oats, rice, oat bran, and water in the rice cooker bowl; stir gently to combine. Close the cover and set for the Porridge cycle.
2. At the end of the cycle, the cereal will be thick and will hold on Keep Warm for 1 to 2 hours. Spoon into bowls and serve hot, topped with milk, a drizzle of maple syrup or honey, and wheat germ.
High-fiber Wheatena, a combination of wheat grits, wheat bran, and wheat germ, is a robust toasted wheat cereal that has been on the super market shelves for decades. Normal stove-top cooking is recommended at about five minutes, way too short, we think, to soften it properly; the coarse grain really tastes best when it has been slow-cooked. We use more water to get a smooth, thick porridge. Simple and delicious, Wheatena just needs some cold milk poured over it.
MACHINE: Medium (6-cup) rice cooker ;
fuzzy logic only
CYCLE: Porridge
YIELD: Serves 2
1 cup Wheatena
2 ⅓ cups water
Pinch of fine sea salt
1. Place the Wheatena, water, and salt in the rice cooker bowl; stir gently to combine. Close the cover and set for the Porridge cycle.
2. At the end of the cycle, the cereal will be thick and will hold on Keep Warm for 1 to 2 hours. Spoon into bowls and serve hot.