For Better Rice, Cook the Rice Like Pasta | Julia At Home (S5 E6)

Today I'm cooking dinner inspired by the Mediterranean, featuring a Mediterranean-style rice salad with dates and almonds that is Ian's absolute favorite. Alright, now let's start making the rice for the rice salad. How you cook the rice for the salad makes all the difference. You can't just make a pilaf and spread it out and expect it to taste good, because if you think about it, room temperature pilaf always has a little bit of a hard crunch to it. That's not tasty. So what we're going to do is we're going to toast the rice, give it a little flavor that way, and then boil it like pasta. So a cup of rice into a skillet. We're going to toast it over medium heat until the grains start to turn a little bit of color. A few of them get a little golden. It takes about eight minutes or so. Once the rice is toasted and it's very fragrant, we're going to add it to salted boiling water and cook it until it's nice and tender. It takes about eight or nine minutes. Then we're going to strain it and spread it out on a rimmed baking sheet and let it cool. This rice is nicely cooled. Time to make salad. So I'm just going to scrape it right into a serving bowl, and this rice has a very different texture than pilaf because we boiled it like pasta, so it'll have a nice, tender texture at room temperature. Now, when you chill it, and you can make this salad ahead of time, it will get a little stiff, so you want to make sure that you bring it back to room temperature before you serve it. To the salad, we're going to add a whole bunch of fresh ingredients, starting with some scallions. I'm just going to trim the edges here, trim the ends, and as I usually do with scallions, I like cutting the white and light green parts in half, just because they have a stronger flavor. If you get a big piece of that in your mouth, it's very scalliony. So cutting them into smaller pieces, less likely to happen. I'm just going to slice them nice and thinly, right onto the rice it goes. Next up, some fresh parsley, about a quarter cup of fresh parsley, nicely chopped, obviously I washed this already. I'm just going to take any of the thick stems out here, you just want the leaves. It's always a judgment call. How much will make a quarter of a cup when it's chopped? I think it usually reduces its volume by about half, so start off with about half a cup of leaves, that's about a quarter cup chopped. It's looking a little more like a third of a cup than a quarter of a cup, but I think for a rice salad, that'll be just fine. Into the bowl it goes, bringing it up top, adding the last few ingredients here. This is why Ian loves it, he loves dates. These are Medjool dates, three quarters of a cup that have been nicely chopped. And I found out, don't buy the pre-chopped dates, they're all dried up, they have a white filmy color, better off to chop them up yourselves, they're nice and moist. Just want to break up any clumps, make sure you don't get too much date in your mouth at one time. You really want to work it into the rice. And some almonds, toasted, sliced almonds, again about three quarters of a cup. I'm going to set this aside while we make the dressing. Very simple dressing. Here we have a quarter cup of olive oil. To this we're going to add a little bit of lemon juice, fresh from a lemon, about two and a half tablespoons or so, that looks pretty good. About a teaspoon of fresh orange zest, I washed, I scrubbed this orange beforehand. And about two tablespoons of juice, which is about half an orange, one, two, perfect. And last but not least, a little bit of cinnamon, quarter of a teaspoon. The cinnamon really just brings the almonds and the dates all together, almost adds a sweet quality without adding any sugar. There's plenty of sugar in those dates. Alright, going to whisk this all together. Mmm, perfect. This dressing all over. It's not a lot of dressing, it's just enough to give the rice some flavor. And then toss it all together. Ian's going to be so happy I made this. Whenever I make this and there's any leftovers, if he doesn't eat it for breakfast, the next day it's gone by lunchtime. This is one of his favorite side dishes. It is such a good combination, the sweetness of the dates, the toastiness of the almonds. Thanks for watching. What'd you think? Leave a comment below and let me know what you're excited to cook this week. You can get today's recipes and more for free at our website.