R016The Chilled-and-Reheated Rice Method
Cooked rice, chilled overnight, reheated once
Recipes › Rice, Grains and the Grain Question in Practice
R015
Matta Rice, Properly Cooked
Kerala's parboiled red rice, by absorption and by draining
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
Plan ahead: plus 30 minutes soaking — recommended.
The re-engineeringNothing is taken out of the rice. What changes is that it is weighed — 50 g dry a head instead of an unmeasured scoop — and that the grain is unpolished parboiled rather than polished white.
This is the foundation recipe of the book, and the one most often got wrong in diaspora kitchens, where matta arrives in a 5 kg sack and is then cooked like basmati. It is not basmati. It is a hard, parboiled, pigmented grain that wants a soak and a long simmer, and it will stay stubbornly chalky at the centre if you rush it. Cooked properly it is faintly nutty, pinkish-fawn, and firm enough to stand under a fierce fish curry without dissolving into it. Get this right and forty recipes downstream get easier.
Matta Rice, Properly Cooked
Active 10 minutes Total 45 minutes
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓200 g (1 cup) unpolished parboiled matta or Kerala red rice
- ✓water to rinse
- ✓500 ml water, for the absorption method or 2 litres water, for the drained method
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) M07 the 70:30 salt, optional
Allergens: None of the major allergens.
Equipment: Heavy 3-litre pan with a well-fitting lid, or a 3-litre uruli. Digital scale reading to 1 g. Substitute: a pressure cooker works for the absorption method at 2 whistles, then 8 minutes on the lowest flame; you lose the ability to see the grain and gain about 12 minutes.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 176 kcal |
| Protein | 3.9 g |
| Fibre | 1.9 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 38.6 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 40.5 g |
| Sugars | 0.1 g |
| Fat | 0.3 g |
| Saturated fat | 0.1 g |
| Sodium | 140 mg |
From ICMR-NIN IFCT 2017 and USDA FoodData Central. Per-serving figures stay the same when you scale.
Method — tap a step to mark it done, tap a time to start a timer
- Rinse the rice in a bowl of cold water, rubbing it between your palms and pouring off the cloudy water, three or four changes, in all, until the water runs almost clear. It will never go completely clear with matta, because some of the colour is in the grain, not on it.
- Soak in fresh cold water to cover by 3 cm for . Drain. Soaking is not compulsory but it cuts off the simmer and gives a more evenly cooked grain; unsoaked matta needs rather than 20–25.
- Combine the drained rice with 500 ml water and the salt in the pan. Bring to a full rolling boil uncovered over a high flame, .
- Reduce to the lowest flame the hob will hold, cover, and leave undisturbed for if soaked, 35–40 if not. Do not lift the lid in the first . It is done when no free water shows if you tilt the pan, the surface is pocked with small craters, and a grain pressed against the roof of your mouth gives way completely with no chalky core.
- Rest off the heat, still covered, for . This is not optional: the outer layers are wetter than the centre at the moment the heat goes off, and resting equalises them. Fork through once, lightly, from the edge inwards.
- Bring 2 litres of water to a hard boil in the pan. Add the drained rice and the salt and keep it at an open, visible boil, uncovered, stirring once or twice so nothing sits on the base.
- Boil for if soaked, 35–40 if not, until a grain squashed between finger and thumb flattens into a smooth paste with no hard speck at the centre. Start testing at ; matta goes from firm to soft over about four minutes and then keeps going.
- Drain through a colander, tilting the pan away from you. Keep the kanji vellam if you want it, in a jug, and let the rice steam dry in the colander for .
Why this worksParboiling gelatinises the starch inside the intact husk and drives water-soluble B vitamins inward, which is why milled parboiled rice carries 0.17 mg of thiamine per 100 g against 0.05 mg in raw milled rice. That same pre-gelatinisation hardens the grain, so matta needs longer cooking and more water than white rice, and holds its shape in a gravy instead of collapsing.
Sourcing note
Ask for rosematta, Palakkadan matta, unda matta or "Kerala red parboiled rice". In the UK and Gulf, Indian and Sri Lankan grocers stock it in 5 and 10 kg bags; in the US and Canada, South Asian shops and online sellers do. The words to look for on the sack are parboiled and unpolished or single-polished; "extra polished" and "silky" are the ones to put back. Sri Lankan rathu kekulu is a very close substitute and often easier to find. If nothing red is available, brown parboiled long-grain is the next best thing — cook it as below, expect a blander grain, and keep the portion the same.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: the glycaemic load of this portion is where the argument lives. At 38.6 g of net carbohydrate and the glycaemic index of 38 measured for Rose Matta in Kerala (Pavithran et al., 2020), the load is about 15; at a published Indian value of 57.6 for unpolished parboiled rice (Shobana et al., 2017), about 22. Either is a moderate meal. Double the portion and you double the number, which is the whole point of weighing it.
Blood pressure: 140 mg of sodium per portion, and you can cook it with none at all — the curry beside it carries the salt. Against a 2,000 mg daily target that leaves the day's budget essentially untouched.
Cholesterol: 0.1 g of saturated fat. Rice is not where your saturated fat comes from; the coconut milk, the ghee and the oil are.
Swap it
Matta → brown parboiled long-grain. Cooks in similar time, milder and less interesting, and it will not stand up to a Kottayam fish curry the way matta does.
Matta → white raw rice (pachari). Faster and softer, and you give up the thiamine advantage and most of the glycaemic one. Keep the 50 g dry portion, which now matters more.
Absorption → pressure cooker. Same yield, no visual control, and matta overcooks in a pressure cooker within about 90 seconds of the right point.
Scale it
Above 500 g the absorption ratio drops slightly because proportionally less water evaporates, which is why the 10-serving row is 2.3 rather than 2.5 parts water.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Best within an hour of cooking. Fridge 24 hours only, and get it there fast: spread it in a shallow covered container and refrigerate within 1 hour of cooking. Freeze 1 month in 130 g portions, flat in bags. Reheat once and once only, with a tablespoon of water, covered, until steaming hot right through — 2–3 minutes in a pan, 90 seconds to 2 minutes in a microwave. Never reheat the same rice twice. These are the UK Food Standards Agency's limits for cooked rice, not this book's: chill ideally within one hour, keep no more than one day, and never reheat rice more than once.
Leftovers
Troubleshooting
Chalky white core after 30 minutes: not enough water, or the flame was too low to hold a simmer. Add 100 ml boiling water, cover, and give it 8–10 minutes more.
Gluey, collapsed grains: overcooked by three or four minutes, or stirred during the simmer. Stirring rice releases surface starch; the absorption method wants no stirring at all.
Rice tastes flat and smells of nothing: the sack is old. Matta's oils go stale within about six months of milling; buy smaller bags more often and keep them sealed away from heat.
Serve with
R023 Kerala Khichdi principles apply to any rice meal — put a pulse on the plate. R081 Moru Curry · R084 Ulli Theeyal · R086 Rasam · M07 the 70:30 salt
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