By now, you’ve stored up quite a bit of beans and rice in Mylar bags, with oxygen absorbers and it’s all safely packed away in 5 gallon buckets. Are you familiar with the process to cook these dry goods and make them edible? Download our cook-beans-and-rice.pdf for printing or saving on your mobile device (You really should print this and stick it with your buckets of beans and rice – You may not be the one who ends up cooking them.)
Cooking Rice
Measure approx 1/2 cup of uncooked rice per person.
Instructions
- Boil water and add salt. For most rice, use a 1:2 ratio of one cup of rice to two cups of water
- Add rice into the boiling water. (careful, we don’t want to get burned)
- Stir once, just enough to separate the rice.
- Cover the pot and simmer.
- Fluff rice with a fork.
Approximate cooking times:
- White Rice: 14 to 25 minutes
- Brown Rice: 30 to 40 minutes
- Wild Rice: 45 to 60 minutes
When done, the rice will be firm but tender, and no longer crunchy. It is fine if it’s slightly sticky but it should NOT be gummy. If there is still water in the pan when the rice is done, slightly tilt the pan to drain it off.
Cooking Beans
Like many people, you’ve probably avoided cooking beans. You may have heard that they are tricky or complicated. Cooking beans is no more complicated than soaking your beans overnight, then filling a pot of water and letting them simmer all afternoon. That’s all there is to it! The biggest thing to understand about beans is that they take time to cook. Once they’re on the stove and simmering, it can take anywhere from an hour to three hours (and occasionally longer) for them to become tender. There’s no magical way to predict it. The age of your beans, variety, and size can all affect the cooking time.
Instructions
- Soak the beans overnight.
- Drain the soaked beans.
- Transfer beans to a cooking pot.
- Bring the beans to a boil.
- Reduce to a simmer and cook.
- Cook the beans. (for as long as it takes. 1 hour, 3 hours, 3.5 hours)
- Add the salt when beans are just barely tender.
- Cool and store the beans.
Now that you have the basics down, you are ready to get cooking!
Print out this PDF cheat-sheet: cook-beans-and-rice.pdf, so you someone can cook beans and rice if food gets scarce.