Cooking brown rice requires a good amount of patience, but the process is rather simple. This recipe uses a green tomato-based sofrito … which simply means breaking down a bunch of green tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and aromatic ingredients in a food processor so their flavors can be easily extracted as a sautéed flavor base. That’s literally all I’m doing differently with this brown rice recipe. You can usually find green tomatoes at farmers markets in the summer and fall seasons. Or if you grow tomatoes, making a sofrito is a great way to utilize your unripe tomato harvests in the fall.
I first learned about sofrito in the context of learning Puerto Rican cooking from Chef Daisy Martinez. From that, I simply did the same concept using ingredients from American Southern cooking which I posted more extensively a couple years ago. Check that out if you want to take this recipe to another level. The sofrito for THIS recipe is much more simplistic with only 4 ingredients. I’m also incorporating some white vinegar to give a “pickled green tomato” edge to it.
After the sofrito is sautéed, the only difference in cooking brown rice instead of white rice is using less water and simmering longer. I posted a quite extensive list of “Dos and Don’ts” about cooking white rice, so definitely check it out because much of those same tips apply to brown rice.
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Even though I grew my own Tabasco peppers, you can also find pickled Tabasco peppers at grocery stores.
Green Tomato Brown Rice
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
