I eat a lot of rice: brown, white, black, basmati, something called TexMati that I don't quite understand. I find it to be a suitable carbo-base for just about any meal. And, maybe it's because I was raised on Cream of Rice, but I've always enjoyed rice as an actual meal (see: grad school; whenever I get a stomach bug). Until recently, however, I never once thought about how to season rice.
Okay, that's not entirely true. Usually I add salt and a pat of butter or sesame oil. I've tried adding dry spices like garlic and onion powder with kinda meh results. A spiced rice pilaf is nice but takes forethought. And I've definitely made a few boxes of yellow rice in my time—hello, MSG! But it wasn't until a Wasabi opened in the basem*nt of our building—and I began frequenting it very, uh, frequently—that I truly understood what simply seasoned rice could do.
Wasabi serves all kinds of sushi rolls and bowls: It's the only grab-and-go food I find myself craving day after day. My standby is the salmon poke over rice (NOT raw cabbage, which is the low-carb and deeply disappointing option). I love this bowl because I love raw salmon in all forms, but what keeps me coming back is the rice, which is vinegar-forward and just slightly sweet.
The rice vinegar seasoning in this tuna poke recipe comes from seasoning the fish, but you could copy the dressing recipe for just rice if you want.
If you're thinking, "That sounds like sushi rice," you'd be correct. Sushi rice is usually seasoned with rice vinegar, sugar, and salt, mixed together and added once the rice is cooked. Easy, I know. But, until I started a serious relationship with this lunch bowl, it hadn't occurred to me that I could make any rice taste like sushi rice—raw fish or not.
A few weeks ago, when I was making a pot of rice to go along with these out-of-control good sesame chicken thighs, I tried it. For one cup of rice, I used ¼ cup rice vinegar, 1 Tbsp. sugar, and 1 Tsp. salt. I stirred it into the cooked rice, then let it steam in the pot while I finished the chicken. The vinegary sweetness in the rice played nice with the Sriracha in the chicken: It was bold, to be sure, but I was converted.
Since then, I've seasoned a variety of other rice in a variety of other dishes (it's hard to go wrong if you taste along the way). It's elevated a vegetable stir-fry from underwhelming to I-wanted-seconds, and the leftovers topped with a simple fried egg made a breakfast I crave almost as often as that poke bowl. Eventually, I'll probably get sick of sushi-ifying every pot of rice I make and branch out to other flavors. But once a rice-seasoner, always a rice-seasoner. I can assure you, I'll never go back.
