Chinese Black Rice or Forbidden Rice

A wonderful foodstuff: as most supermarkets now carry Jasmine and Basmati rice, it is to be hoped Black (Forbidden) Rice, too, will become widely available. Apart from its striking color and taste, it should be noted that the rice is chock-full of antioxidants, and a good amount of high quality protein as well. I buy it online from Lotus Foods and they have a particularly nice recipe on their package. But this is a good, all purpose procedure. I like to saute the rice lightly in a little ghee, clarified butter, canola or peanut oil before adding the water.

Way too much water. I would use 1 cup black rice and 1.5 cup water next time...

Thank you for posting this recipe! I have a bag of black rice in the pantry but there are no directions on the package. Used your recipe to make: Recipe #300204 (for replacing wild rice). cg

I quite agree with Hiromi and jashley1000: Use 1.5 parts water to one part rice. Cooking rice can be a moving target because it can retain different amounts of water depending on how old and/or dried out it is. You can always add water, but I found the recommended ration 2 to 1 water to rice to produce rice that was too mushy. If you get stuck with mushy rice, you can always heat in the oven at a slow temp to dry it out, but better to get it right first time around.

I have never made this type of rice before, so I didn't know what to expect. I cooked this in my electric rice cooker. When I opened the pot after it was done cooking, I was very surprised to see that the entire grain of rice was black. I was expecting the inside to be white. The rice didn't "fluff" up like other types of rice, so I thought it wasn't done cooking. I added more water and tried cooking it for another 20 minutes. Sadly, some of it burnt, but I was able to salvage most of it. The flavor is nice and it smells so good when it's cooking, reminds me of jasmine rice. We recently ate at a Korean restaurant where we had something called Bi Bim Bap, which was served with another type of black rice. I was trying to recreate this dish. I served the rice with a mixture of sliced beef, strips of fried egg, julienne carrots, cucumber, bean sprouts, broccoli slaw and tossed with sesame oil. DH really enjoyed this.