Rice Around the World

For most of the people on earth, rice is not a side dish. It is the plate. Across much of Asia, West Africa and Latin America the meat or the stew is the accompaniment and the rice is the meal — the thing people fill up on, and the thing that is there every day. The American habit of treating rice as the beige layer under a stir-fry is, by world standards, backwards.

It is one grain, and yet every rice culture cooks it as though the others were doing it wrong. Persian cooking wants the grains separate and standing apart, with a golden crust at the bottom of the pot that the table competes for. Italian cooking wants them bound in a glossy, spoonable cream. Lao and northern Thai cooking want rice sticky enough to pinch into a ball with the fingers. Cajun cooking wants it to soak up everything in the pot until it is the pot. These are not degrees of skill. They are different ideas of what rice is for, and most of them are built on one species.

This is a tour — not a comprehensive one, which would fill a shelf — of the big traditions, organized by technique, because technique shows how they relate. Two dishes that look nothing alike on the plate can be cousins in the pot, and two that look identical can be built on opposite principles. Where a dish connects to something in the recipe collection, it is linked, and where the popular story is wrong, the page says so.

For the mechanics behind any of this, the cooking page covers the methods, types covers which grain does what, and history covers how rice got everywhere in the first place — including some of it that isn’t a pretty story.

The pilaf family: toast, then absorb, and keep the grains apart

Start with the biggest technique family on earth, because once it is recognized it turns up everywhere. The pilaf method is: coat or toast the dry rice in fat (often with aromatics), then add a measured amount of hot liquid, cover, and let the grains absorb it without stirring. The point is separate, distinct grains — every grain fluffy, defined, standing on its own. This is the opposite of the risotto and the sticky-rice philosophies, where the grains are meant to cling. Toasting in fat before the liquid goes in coats each grain and helps keep them from gluing together, and cooking by absorption rather than in a flood of water means the starch that would make them sticky mostly stays put.

The word travels almost as far as the technique. Pilaf is the Turkish and English form; pilau/pulao in South Asia, polow in Iran, pilav, plov, pilafi — they’re all the same root word chasing the same idea across half the globe. The technique is probably Iranian in origin — first written down, in the thirteenth century, in Arabic.

Persia and Central Asia

Iranian cooking separates the grains and prizes the crust. Chelow is plain rice soaked, parboiled in heavily salted water, drained and steamed; polow layers the same rice with herbs, fruit or meat; kateh, cooked by absorption, is the everyday rice of the rice-growing Caspian; and the golden crust at the bottom of the pot is tahdig, “bottom of the pot.” Much of this is younger than it looks: the boil-and-drain method “seem[s] to have originated in the Qajar period,” the nineteenth century (Encyclopaedia Iranica), and the sixteenth-century Persian cookbooks do not mention tahdig at all.

In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan the dish becomes plov, cooked in a wide kazan: meat, onions and a great deal of carrot are stewed, and the rice is laid over the stew and cooked in it. That is a different technique from Persian polow, not a variant of it — an earlier version of this page called them the same family. Plov is on UNESCO’s list twice, and UNESCO’s own file says it is cooked “by men and women.” The full story, with the recipes, is on Persia and Central Asia.

South Asia: pulao and biryani

Pulao is an absorption dish: rice cooked in a measured amount of seasoned liquid with everything else. Biryani is layered and sealed, finished on low heat (dum), and comes in two schools. In kacchi biryani raw marinated meat goes under part-cooked rice and cooks only in the dum; in pakki biryani the meat is cooked first. The collection’s Chicken Biryani (Dum Style) is a kacchi biryani — an earlier version of this page described the pakki method while linking it. Basmati, the everyday rices, idli and dosa, and the Mughal texts that are less clear about biryani than its legend is, are on South Asia.

The Arab and Turkish table

The same pilaf idea anchors the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf. Across the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula, spiced rice — often toasted with vermicelli, studded with nuts and dried fruit, scented with cinnamon, cardamom and clove — is the standard bed for roasted or braised meat; the great shared platters of rice crowned with lamb are the form most visitors meet. The collection’s Arabic Style Rice with Lamb Meat belongs to this tradition. Turkish pilav keeps it simpler and often finishes with a knob of butter stirred through; the toasted-vermicelli move that shows up in American “rice pilaf” mixes is a direct import from here.

And though it isn’t rice, the same technique carries over to other grains: Quinoa Pilaf with Seared Scallops and Steak + Brussels Sprouts + Quinoa Pilaf are pilaf in method even though the grain changed. Toast, add measured liquid, absorb, keep it separate — the method runs on almost any grain. A plain version of the rice itself is Green Pea Rice, Asparagus Rice.

Louisiana: two opposite philosophies in one kitchen

Louisiana is a rice culture — the southwest of the state grows a large share of the American crop, and Cajun and Creole food is built around it. It makes an unusually good teaching example because one small corner of one state holds two opposite philosophies of rice side by side on the same menu.

Jambalaya: the rice cooks in the pot

Jambalaya is Louisiana’s pilaf — and it really is one, a first cousin of paella and plov. The cook builds a base (the “holy trinity” of onion, celery, bell pepper; meat and sausage; tomato in the Creole version, often none in the Cajun), then the raw rice goes right into the pot and cooks in the seasoned liquid, absorbing all of it, until the rice is the dish and carries every bit of flavor built beneath it. Nothing is served alongside; it is all one pot. That’s the pilaf principle wearing a Louisiana accent.

The Creole/Cajun split is real: Creole (New Orleans) jambalaya is red — it has tomatoes — while Cajun (rural, prairie) jambalaya is brown, no tomato, its color coming from meat browned hard and the fond scraped up off the pot. Jambalaya is one of the rice dishes I cook, and I keep a working version that is still being adjusted, Jambalaya, Louisiana, my ongoing recipe, alongside a rack of others to compare it against: the classic Jambalaya, a Cajun Jambalaya, Chicken and Sausage Jambalaya, Jambalaya, Seafood, Creole, Jambalaya, Shrimp, Jambalaya, Ground Beef, a Tennessee Valley Jambalaya for the up-country variation, and the two from the old masters — Justin Wilson’s Chicken and Sausage Jambalaya and Virginia Willis’ Seafood and Chiken Jambalaya.

Gumbo: the rice is served under the stew

Now the opposite. Gumbo is not a rice dish — it is a stew with rice. The gumbo is built on its own (a dark roux, the trinity, okra or filé to thicken, seafood or chicken-and-sausage), simmered long, and then ladled over a scoop of plain white rice cooked completely separately. The rice here is the pilaf’s philosophical opposite: a neutral, fluffy platform that soaks up the stew but never joins it in the pot. Same kitchen, same week, same cook — but jambalaya says the rice is the dish and gumbo says the rice is the plate. That contrast is why Louisiana is the best single place to see what a rice philosophy is.

The collection runs deep here: Gumbo, New Orleans Creole (mine), Chicken and Andouille Gumbo, Chicken and Smoked Sausage Gumbo, Andouille Sausage Gumbo, Gumbo, Seafood, Gumbo, Seafood, Chicken and Sausage, Gumbo, Shrimp, Mr. B’s Gumbo Ya-Ya, and Justin Wilson’s Seafood Gumbo.

Dirty rice, red beans, and Savannah red rice

Between those two poles Louisiana has a whole middle. Dirty rice is white rice cooked and then “dirtied” by cooking it with finely chopped chicken livers and gizzards, ground pork, and the trinity — the offal is what turns it brown and gives it the name, and it is one of the great uses of the parts nobody else wanted. See Dirty Rice and Justin Wilson’s Dirty Rice.

Red beans and rice is the Monday tradition — beans simmered all day with a ham bone (by tradition, Monday was wash day and the pot could sit unattended), served over rice like a gumbo. The collection has the New Orleans Style Red Beans and Rice, Red Beans and Rice, Justin Wilson’s Red Beans and Rice, Pableaux’s Monday Night Red Beans, and a Pressure Cooker Red Beans and Rice for when Monday gets away.

Carry the rice tradition east along the coast and there is Savannah red rice, the Lowcountry’s tomato-red rice with sausage and bacon, which food historians describe as a creolised relative of West African rice dishes such as jollof. See Savannah Red Rice and West Africa and the Carolinas. A Louisiana–Italy crossover, Saffron Crawfish Risotto, leads on to Italy.

Spain: paella, and the crust called socarrat

Paella comes from Valencia, and in Valencian the word means the pan. It is cooked in a thin layer over a wide fire; once the rice is spread in the pan it is not stirred, and the bottom toasts into the socarrat. The rice is short and absorbent — bomba is officially a short grain, and Valencia’s protected rices also include Senia and Albufera. The famous ten-ingredient rule for paella valenciana is a 2011 certification scheme, and older Valencian rice dishes had chorizo in them. Paella is one of the rice dishes I cook; a sourced Paella Valenciana and the rest of the story, from al-Andalus to arroz rojo, are on Spain and Latin America.

Italy: risotto, and the creaminess built by stirring

Now flip the philosophy completely. If paella forbids stirring, risotto demands it. Here the goal is not separate grains but a bound, glossy, spoonable creaminess, and every step is designed to coax starch out of the rice instead of keeping it in.

Italy uses high-starch short-grain varieties — Arborio, Carnaroli, Vialone Nano — that are loaded with the sticky-making starch (amylopectin; the science page explains why that matters). The rice is toasted in butter (the tostatura), then hot stock goes in a ladle at a time, with almost constant stirring, so that friction and the slow feeding of liquid draw the surface starch off each grain into the broth, thickening it into a natural cream — no flour, no dairy needed for the body. The grains stay al dente at the core while the sauce around them turns silky.

It ends with a step worth naming: the mantecatura, the final off-heat beating-in of cold butter and grated Parmesan that whips the whole thing into that signature loose, glossy, wave-when-the-pan-is-shaken texture. That last step is the difference between rice-in-sauce and true risotto.

I cook risotto too, and the collection is deep here. The Basic Risotto teaches the method; the rest range out: Mushroom Risotto, Risotto with Wild Mushrooms (Risotto ai Funghi), Risotto with Vegetables, the dramatic Black Squid Ink Risotto with Grilled Prawns, Lobster and Green Onion Vinaigrette, and the saffron classic in three different masters’ hands — Risotto alla Milanese (Bastianich), Risotto alla Milanese (Frugal Gourmet), and Risotto alla Milanese (Saffron Risotto). That a Louisiana Saffron Crawfish Risotto even exists shows how far these techniques travel once a cook gets hold of them.

East Asia: where rice is the meal, plainly

Move to East Asia and something shifts. Here rice is most often cooked plainly — steamed or in a cooker, no fat, no toasting, no stirring — precisely because it is the foundation everything else sits on. The technique gets quiet so the rice can be the constant. (I keep two fuzzy-logic Zojirushi rice cookers, a large one and a smaller one, for exactly this reason — see Wild Rice Zojirushi.) But quiet doesn’t mean simple, and the dishes built on that foundation are some of the world’s greatest.

Japan: gohan and everything it holds up

In Japanese, cooked rice is gohan — and the same word means “meal.” The language makes the point. The rice is short-grain japonica, faintly sticky on purpose so it can be picked up with chopsticks and shaped by hand, cooked plain and treated with real reverence.

From that one pot of rice comes an entire cuisine of forms:

• Sushi — vinegared rice (the vinegar step has its own section on the products page) shaped and topped or rolled. The collection goes playful here with BBQ Bacon Sushi, Sushi, Cheeseburger, Sushi, Roll, Grilled Bacon, and a classic Vegetable Sushi Rolls.
• Donburi — a bowl of rice with something savory over it, the Japanese weeknight workhorse: Gyudon (Japanese Beef Rice Bowl), Oyakodon (Chicken and Egg Bowl) (the name means “parent-and-child” — chicken and egg), the Soy-Marinated Tuna Rice Bowl (Maguro No Zuke Donburi), the Unagi Hitsumabushi Grilled Eel Rice Bowl, and the Ishiyaki Buri Bop (Hot Stone Yellowtail Rice Bowl).
• Onigiri — rice pressed by hand into triangles around a filling and wrapped in nori, the original and best packed lunch: Onigiri (Japanese Rice Balls), Bento Box, Salmon Onigiri, Salmon Seaweed Rolls (Onigiri Rolls), and the grilled version, Yaki Onigiri Rice Balls with Miso, where the outside crisps into another rice crust.
• Ochazuke — hot green tea (or dashi) poured over a bowl of rice with a few savoury toppings, the classic answer to leftover rice and a late, quiet hunger. It is one of the dishes I eat most often — a favourite — and the collection has two: Ochazuke and Ochazuke (Swanfarms).

Japan also took curry from the British in the late nineteenth century and made it its own: Japanese Curry Rice (Kare Raisu), thick and sweet and poured over rice, is now one of the country’s genuine national dishes.

Fried rice: the day-old-rice science

Nearly every rice culture invented something to do with yesterday’s rice, and the Chinese answer conquered the world: fried rice. The single most important thing about it is counterintuitive — it wants day-old, cold, dried-out rice, not fresh. Fresh hot rice is too moist and gummy; it steams and clumps in the wok. Rice that has spent a night in the fridge has firmed up (its starch has partly retrograded — again, the science page has the details) and lost surface moisture, so the grains stay separate and fry instead of steam. The cooking page walks through it, but the one-line rule is: great fried rice starts the day before.

The collection is full of it: Chinese Fried Rice, Traditional Mandarin Fried Rice, the Korean Kimchi Fried Rice (Kimchi Bokkeum Bap), a Southeast-Asian-leaning Garlic-Black Pepper Lobster with Lemongrass Fried Rice, and a Louisiana one, Fried Rice with Crawfish, Shrimp & Andouille Sausage (mine), fried rice with a Louisiana passport. The humblest version of the idea is just the Leftover Rice Frittata — proof that “what to do with leftover rice” is a universal question with a hundred delicious answers.

China: congee, the other way to cook rice

If plain steamed rice is the everyday and fried rice is the leftover, congee (jook) is rice taken in the opposite direction entirely: cooked with far too much water, for a long time, until the grains break down completely into a savory porridge. It is the sickbed food, the breakfast, the gentle-on-the-stomach staple of a huge part of Asia, endlessly varied by whatever is stirred in. See Century Egg Congee and the easy Instant Pot Congee (Jook).

Korea: bap, bibimbap, gimbap, and rice cakes

Korean rice is bap, and it anchors the meal the same way gohan does in Japan. The showpiece is bibimbap — literally “mixed rice” — a bowl of rice topped with an array of seasoned vegetables, meat, a fried egg and gochujang, all of it mixed together at the table by the eater (and, in the stone-bowl dolsot version, with a crust forming against the hot stone — that crust again). See Bibimbap and Bibimbap (Korean Mixed Rice with Meat and Assorted Vegetables), plus the simpler weeknight Korean Ground Beef and Rice Bowls.

Gimbap is Korea’s rice roll — rice and fillings rolled in seaweed like a sushi roll but seasoned with sesame oil and salt rather than vinegar, and built as picnic food: Gimbap (Korean Seaweed Rice Roll).

And then there are tteok, Korean rice cakes — chewy cylinders and disks made from pounded rice that are a whole food category unto themselves (how they are made is on the products page). The famous dish is tteokbokki, the rice cakes simmered in a sweet-spicy gochujang sauce until glossy and chewy — genuine national street food. The collection has it several times over: Tteokbokki (Spicy Korean Rice Cakes) and two versions of Tteokbokki (Spicy Stir-Fried Rice Cakes), the milder royal-court Korean Royal Court Stir Fried Rice Cakes, and a sweet Korean Rice Cakes with Honey.

Hainanese chicken rice: the rice is the point

One dish deserves singling out because it upends the Western hierarchy so completely. Hainanese chicken rice — Chinese-diaspora cooking that became a defining dish of Singapore and Malaysia — is a plate of poached chicken with rice, but the point every cook there makes is that the rice is the real star. It is cooked in the chicken’s poaching stock with garlic, ginger and rendered chicken fat, so that each grain is saturated with savory chicken flavor. People choose their stall based on the rice. It is the clearest possible statement of the whole philosophy of this page: the chicken is good, but the rice is what people come for. See Hainanese Chicken Rice.

Southeast Asia: sticky rice eaten by hand

Across Laos and northern and northeastern Thailand the daily rice is glutinous, or sticky — which contains no gluten; its starch is almost all amylopectin, the result of a single mutation that probably arose in Southeast Asia. It is soaked for hours, steamed in a woven bamboo cone, kept in a lidded basket and eaten with the hand. Laos is now the exception rather than the rule: by the eighteenth century most of the region had moved to non-glutinous rice. Elsewhere rice runs to the fragrant and the rich — jasmine rice (a trade name for two Thai varieties), Malaysia’s nasi lemak, Indonesia’s nasi goreng, the Philippines’ arroz caldo, a congee with a Spanish name. All of it, with the rice terraces and how old they really are, is on Southeast Asia. The collection’s coconut rice, Restaurant Style Coconut Rice (Coconut Milk), shows what coconut milk does to a pot of rice.

West Africa: jollof, ceebu jën and the thread to Carolina

West Africa domesticated its own rice, African rice (Oryza glaberrima), roughly 2,000–3,000 years ago — a second, separate invention of rice farming — and West Africans were skilled wet-rice farmers long before Europeans arrived. The colonial rice wealth of South Carolina and Georgia was built on the labour of enslaved Africans from start to finish; whether it was built on their knowledge too is argued by historians, and an earlier version of this page stated that as settled. Carolina Gold itself is Asian rice, and how it reached Charleston is unknown.

The flagship dish is jollof, a one-pot tomato-and-pepper rice. The name comes from the Wolof Jolof state, not from a word for “one pot” (that word is benachin), and because tomatoes and chillies are New World plants the dish is far younger than the fourteenth-century state. Its Senegalese ancestor, ceebu jën (“rice and fish”), is on UNESCO’s list. The jollof wars between Nigeria and Ghana are real and cheerful. All of this, with the recipes, is on West Africa and the Carolinas. The collection also has West African Red-Red Beans with Coconut Rice, Avocado, & Sweet Plantain — “red-red” being the Ghanaian bean stew.

The Americas: rice and beans, red rice, and something to drink

Rice came to the Americas from every direction — with the Spanish, with enslaved Africans, with Chinese and other Asian immigrants.

Arroz rojo is a genuine pilaf: the raw rice is fried in oil, then simmered in a tomato-and-broth blend. How far to fry it is not agreed — “until milky white” in Pati Jinich’s method, “until golden” in Serious Eats — and “Spanish rice” is an American name for it. See Arroz Rojo (Mexican Red Rice), Mexican Rice II, the 1944 Army Spanish Rice and Rice Cooker Mexican Rice.

Rice and beans is the daily plate of the Caribbean and Latin America. In Cuba, moros y cristianos cooks rice with black beans in one pot, and congrí is the similar dish with red beans — they are not the same, as an earlier version of this page had it. See Cuban Rice & Beans and Arroz con Pollo (Nicaraguan); gallo pinto, casamiento and Brazil’s arroz e feijão are on Spain and Latin America.

Rice is also a drink and a dessert. Horchata, in its Mexican form, is rice (and often cinnamon) soaked, blended, strained and sweetened; in Spain the drink is made from tiger nuts instead. See Horchata (Authentic Mexican Recipe) and Traditional Mexican Horchata. Rice pudding is nearly universal — arroz con leche, kheer, sütlaç: Rice Pudding, Rice Kheer and the tropical Pineapple Rice Cream. What rice becomes when it stops being a bowl of grains is on Beyond the Grain.

One grain, a hundred grammars

The whole world can be crossed on one plant. The same species — sometimes the same variety — becomes a fluffy Persian polow, a bound Italian cream, a fingertip lump of Lao sticky rice, a smoky Nigerian jollof, a cool Mexican drink, and a bowl of plain white grains under a Louisiana gumbo. Nobody planned that. It happened because rice will do almost anything it is asked, and every culture that took it up asked something different.

The ritual is local and the grain is universal. The cook frying arroz rojo in Guadalajara, the cook steaming sticky rice in a Lao basket and the cook stirring risotto in Milan would each find the others’ method strange — and each is right, because rightness in rice is a local truth. The technique is the accent. The grain is the language everybody happens to speak.

The mechanics are on the cooking page, which grain does what is on the types page, the sometimes uncomfortable story of how rice spread is on history, and what rice becomes once it leaves the bowl is on Beyond the Grain.