WeeklyDelight
Cooking guide

Choosing Rice: Long, Medium and Short Grain

The rice a recipe names is usually there for a reason: different rices hold different starches, and the starch decides whether the grains stay separate or turn creamy.

Rice starch is a mix of two kinds, amylose and amylopectin. Broadly, the more amylose a rice has, the firmer and more separate its grains cook; the more amylopectin, the softer and stickier. Long-grain rices tend to sit at the high-amylose end, short-grain rices at the low end, and glutinous ("sticky") rice has almost none. The grain's length is a rough guide, not a rule: food scientists have found that the structure of the amylopectin matters as well as the amount of amylose.

Which rice for which job

  • Separate, fluffy grains (pilaf, biryani, plain rice beside a curry): a long-grain rice such as basmati, or jasmine, which is long-grain but softer and slightly clingy.
  • Creamy, loose risotto: a medium-grain Italian rice such as arborio or carnaroli, stirred so the surface starch thickens the liquid.
  • Paella: a short, round Spanish rice such as bomba, which is not stirred once the stock is in.
  • Sushi and onigiri: Japanese short-grain rice, sticky enough to hold a shape.
  • Mango sticky rice and other sweet sticky rice dishes: glutinous rice, usually soaked and steamed rather than boiled.
  • Fried rice: cooked rice that has been chilled, so the grains are firm enough to fry without turning to mush.

Swapping one for another is possible, but the result changes: basmati in a risotto stays in separate grains and never turns creamy; arborio in a pilaf turns soft and sticky. When a recipe here names a rice, the method's times are for that rice.

Keeping cooked rice

Cooked rice needs more care than most leftovers. Food Standards Scotland explains that uncooked rice can contain spores of Bacillus cereus that survive cooking, and that the longer cooked rice sits at room temperature, the more likely the bacteria are to produce a toxin that makes it unsafe. Its advice: chill cooked rice as quickly as possible, ideally within an hour (spreading it out or dividing it helps), do not keep it longer than 24 hours, make sure it is steaming hot all the way through when you reheat it, and never reheat it more than once. The recipes on this site that start from cold cooked rice say so in the ingredient list, and their times do not include cooking it.

What this guide does not settle

Whether rinsing makes a noticeable difference to each of the rices above, and how much the water ratio should change for each, are questions for a side-by-side test in a kitchen. That test has not been done for this site; the plan for it is recorded for whoever cooks it.

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