Cooking rice in Asia is a lot like grilling burgers in America - a person is seemingly born with the ability to do it, and no one dares speak up if he or she doesn't actually know how.
In America, preparing rice was simple. I just read what Uncle Ben had to say on the back of his box, although I still often managed to turn it into soup or leave an inch or two burned on the bottom of the pan.
Rice is a staple of my diet, but I had no idea how difficult it would be for me to prepare it at home. It's not that rice is hard to find in Singapore. The options are limitless - long grain, medium grain, short grain, white rice, premium quality fragrant rice, brown rice, mixed rice, red rice, jasmine rice, basmati rice, parboiled rice, calasparra rice, calrose rice, glutinous rice, calmochi rice, unpolished rice. There's rice from India and Thailand and China and Australia and you name it.
I've never seen so much rice in Singapore, but all the rice from all over the world shares one trait in common - there are no directions how to cook it. This is Asia. Everyone just knows how.
For the first month, with the exception of dining out, I had to pass on the food I love so much. I was too embarrassed to ask how Singaporeans inherited the rice-cooking gene, while I had to rely on a list of step-by-step instructions.
I turned to pasta, which I also enjoy, but like many items in Singapore, pasta isn't cheap, often selling for more than $2 a bag. Aside from price, I just didn't want to be defeated by a grain.
Over this past month, the members of my department have been quite patient with my endless cultural questions, especially Joseph and Nora, who are both from Singapore.
So, this week, I finally worked up the courage to ask them how I, too, could learn to cook rice. I expected a long, complicated series of instructions, or a reference to some kind of family secret, but Nora just smiled and said, "Aw, the rice cooker."
The rice cooker.
I'd seen them in every store in Singapore, but I assumed they were just for restaurants or families of five. Certainly, I didn't need one, until I couldn't crack the rice code.
Joseph generously offered to lend me an extra one from home. Yesterday, I set it up and decided there was no time like the present to conquer my rice phobia. Off to the store I went, thinking I'd play it safe and purchase a bag of white rice, since it's normally simple to cook and fast.
I went as far as picking the bag up and walking toward the cashier. Then, I got cocky, spotting a bag of brown rice, my old nemesis. I'd ruined many a pan with my foe.
Just start off slow. Work up to the big leagues. Get a victory under your belt first.
But I wanted to see what my cooker was capable of doing. I went for it all, buying brown, unpolished, Thai rice.
Joseph told me that the rice-cooking process was easy. All I had to do was put in one cup of water per one cup of rice and leave the rest to the machine. Sounds relatively straightforward, but you must understand that a Singaporean's recipe for the correct mixture of water and rice is a lot like a barbeque aficionado's recipe for BBQ sauce. There's a whole lot of opinions. In Singapore, the internet is full of debate about just the right rice/water combination.
However, I stuck with Joseph's advice and went one for one.
The minutes passed. I knew that brown rice takes a lot longer, but I assumed that I did something wrong because the machine continued to run, not automatically stopping, as Joseph told me it would do when the rice was finished.
I fought the temptation to open the lid. I waited, assuming that the bottom of the cooker would be coated with a thick blanket of burned rice. I began to think how I would tell Joseph that I had ruined his machine.
Then, after about an hour, the machine beeped, announcing it was time to open the lid. I hesitated. If I failed, I'd have to go back to the $2 pasta, hanging my head in shame.
Slowly, I popped open the lid. No smoke, but surely I'd done something wrong. I gently plunged my wooden spoon inside and moved around a few grains. Nothing charred. Nothing stuck to the bottom. Just perfect rice.
The rice cooker managed to do what I had not been able to accomplish over years of trying - cooking brown rice to perfection.
Last night, I read that the seemingly uncomplicated rice cooker is actually a quite sophisticated kitchen appliance, detecting the moment that the water inside the machine has steamed off and the rice is ready to eat. Then, it manages to keep the rice warm for hours without burning a grain, and best of all, the machine is known for being extremely forgiving of operator error.
And so, I achieved another small, Singaporean victory, solving the mystery of cooking a bag of rice. The pasta could wait until another day.
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