Anyway, today was the day I steamed the rice that I soaked in the refrigerator for 18 hours. I'm quite impressed with the results. The rice wasn't sticky, was translucent instead of solid white, was squishy but not mushy, and it breaks up easily compared to regular cooked rice.
I used the bamboo steamer technique. I didn't have cheesecloth so I used the thinnest cotton kitchen towel I had. It worked perfectly! I wouldn't recommend that for those with significant-others that are sensitive to kitchen towels being used for bizarre grain-cooking rituals, but I can get away with it. ;) Don't ask about the goofy yellow pattern...
You want to soak the dry rice in the refrigerator for 18 hours then steam it. Soak with enough water on top of the rice so it won't soak it all up and run out. I initially had about 2.5" of water on top which went down to 1.5" after the rice took up it's share. I vaguely remember something about 6 hours being enough time to soak with 18 being marginally better, but I've slept since then. I soaked it for 18 hours this time.
Today, I steamed it for 45 minutes. Next action on this batch will be Monday afternoon! Stay tuned...
As a side note, as it turns out I didn't get enough homebrewing action today since pretty much all I did was steam some rice and throw it in a bucket with koji and water so I started a batch of semi-dry mead, too. But that, my friends, is a totally different story.
Nice work, Tim! I'll try to answer your question about rice soaking without adding too much to the confusion of a new homebrewing process:
ReplyDeleteReally, what you want is for that rice to soak up 33% of its original mass in water - this is the water that will actually cook (gelatinize) the rice starch during steaming.
The easiest way (from a homebrewer's viewpoint) to do that is to just cover it with water and stick it in the fridge overnight. But, if you're using a graduated container (like a large measuring cup for smaller amounts of rice), you can narrow down the minimum amount of time it takes to get that water into the rice grains. What you're looking for is the volume of the rice to increase by 33% - if you start with 6 cups of rice, you want to see 8 cups after soaking.
In my own experiments, I've found that one to two hours is plenty of time for the Kokuho Rose rice that I normally use (the 60% polished rice from F.H. Steinbart only took half an hour).
The advantages to the shorter soaking time? Besides the shorter amount of time (for those who are planning-ahead-challenged), I've found that the resulting steamed rice is even less sticky when soaked for a period of time shorter than the overnight/18 hours that I recommend in my sake making guide. Other than that, there's no real difference and most of the time I just soak the rice overnight because I find it easier to space the different parts of the sake making process out in that manner.
Thanks, Bob! This totally makes sense now. I didn't use a graduated container for soaking the rice this time but I will next time so I can stop it right at 33%.
ReplyDeleteIn everything I read, the time it takes to soak the rice has always seemed more like mysterious secret knowledge than science. Articles about kuras that quoted soak times down to the second for highly polished rice didn't give me a lot of confidence that I could produce something tasty without a ton of time in research.
Describing it in terms of the increase in rice volume makes a lot more sense to me. So from what you've experienced, no matter what the rice polish you want a 33% increase?