So many videos exist about how cooking brown rice correctly and I’m here to show you how simple it can be. And you happen to be growing tomatoes, here’s something you can do with any unripe gems you might have left in your autumn garden. Or if you can find green tomatoes elsewhere, by all means do so.
Basically, the only difference in cooking brown rice as instead of white rice is in the water amounts and cooking time. I posted a quite extensive list of “Dos and Don’ts” about cooking white rice, so definitely check it out. To me, some techniques seem quite cumbersome, and really don’t need to be.
All I’m doing here is making a sofrito as a sauté base to season the rice … which just means chopping up a bunch of peppeprs, herbs, and aromatic ingredients super small, almost paste-like. I first learned about sofrito in the context of learning Puerto Rican cooking from Chef Daisy Martinez, so here I’m doing the same with some American Southern ingredients. I posted a more extensive green tomato sofrito a couple years ago, so definitely check it out. This version is much more simplistic. I’m also incorporating some white vinegar to give a “pickled green tomato” edge to it.
I grew my own Tabasco peppers, but also look for pickled Tabasco peppers in vinegar at a grocery store (below).
Ingredients
- 1 cup brown rice
For the sofrito:
- 10 green cherry tomatoes (or equivalent amount of green regular tomatoes)
- 3 Tabasco peppers
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 1/3 cup chopped parsley
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 tablespoon white vinegar
- 1 heaping teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 ½ cups water (or veggie stock)
Instructions
- In a fine mesh strainer, rinse your brown rice with luke warm water until the residual water runs clean. Set aside.
- Loosely chop the green tomatoes, Tabasco peppers, garlic, and parsley separately on a large cutting board. Then combine them all and finely chop them all down together. This will yield ⅓ cup of sofrito.
Note: You could use a mini-food processor if you perhaps double or triple the amounts to make a large batch of sofrito. This minimalist recipe is for 1 cup of rice amount which yields 3 ½ cups of cooked brown rice. - In a medium, wide-bottomed pot, heat the olive oil on medium-high until it starts to shimmer. Stir in the sofrito, kosher salt, and vinegar. Cook this until it begins to brown slightly, stirring occasionally.
- Stir in the brown rice so it’s evenly distributed. Increase the temperature to high and add the water (or veggie stock). Give it a few quick stirs to loosen up some of the yummy browned sofrito bits from the bottom of the pot. Do not over-stir.
- Bring this to a boil for two minutes. Then reduce heat, and lower to a simmer with the lid on for 45 minutes. Only after the first 20 minutes, stir it gently with a fork to redistribute the rice. Do not remove the lid for the remaining 25 minutes.
- After 45 minutes, remove the lid and gently fluff the cooked brown rice with a fork and let it rest with the lid jar. Then, serve.
Yield: 3 ½ cups
