Lift the lid on a pot of rice made the way the bag says and you often find a pale, wet clump, every grain stuck to its neighbor and tasting like the water it was cooked in. According to Edna Jackson, a 68-year-old cook from Greensboro, Alabama, that is not your fault. She says the instructions on every bag treat rice like an afterthought, and in the kitchens she grew up in, rice was never that.
Edna has spent most of her life cooking for her family, friends and neighbors, and she says that in the South, rice was the supper. The meat was there to season the rice, not the other way around. Her Big Mama had a trick for it, and Edna says it is the reason she has not served plain side dish rice in a good long while.
Her version is a one-pot supper of chicken, smoked sausage and rice, where the rice cooks right in the pot with the meat and drinks up every bit of flavor. Folks in the Carolina low country have made rice this way for a couple of hundred years, and it goes by perloo, pilau or, in some towns, chicken bog. Edna calls hers a little Alabama kitchen version of that idea. It feeds six to eight people, and when she priced it out this week, the whole pot came to somewhere around $12 to $15, depending on what your store charges for the sausage.
What Goes In The Pot
Edna’s list is short, and most of it is probably already in your kitchen. You need 2 pounds of bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, which is about six thighs, and 1 pound of smoked sausage with some snap to it. Add one large yellow onion, one green bell pepper, two ribs of celery and four cloves of garlic.
Then come 2 cups of plain long-grain white rice, 4 cups of chicken stock, a bay leaf, a teaspoon each of dried thyme and paprika, black pepper, salt, a pinch of cayenne if you like heat, and 2 tablespoons of butter for the end. She says the whole supper needs no side dishes, and you will not hear a single complaint.
Buy The Cheapest Bag
Standing in the rice aisle, plenty of people reach for jasmine, basmati or the fancy box with gold lettering. Edna says every one of those is the wrong rice for this pot, because jasmine makes the whole supper smell like flowers and this is a smoky, savory dish. What she wants is plain long-grain white rice from the bottom shelf. Long grain has less of the sticky starch that makes rice cling together, so it stays in separate grains, and in her words the $2 bag was always the right bag.
She also wants a heavy pot with a tight lid, such as a Dutch oven or a big cast iron pot, because the steam is what cooks the rice.
Rinse, Drain And Season
Every grain wears a dusty coat of loose starch, and Edna says the second that dust meets hot liquid it turns into glue. So she puts the 2 cups of rice in a strainer and runs cool water over it, stirring with her fingers until the water runs mostly clear. Then comes the part she says everybody rushes: let the rice drain for a few minutes while you prep. Wet rice cannot toast, so it should go into the hot pot dry.
Meanwhile, pat the chicken thighs dry, because wet skin will never brown, and season them with a teaspoon of salt, plenty of black pepper, the paprika and the cayenne. An hour ahead is good, and a morning in the refrigerator is better, but 5 minutes works too. Slice the sausage into half-inch coins, dice the onion, pepper and celery small and even, and mince the garlic.
Brown The Meat And Keep The Good Stuff
Set the heavy pot over medium heat with a tablespoon of oil and lay the chicken in skin side down. Leave it alone for 8 to 10 minutes until the skin is deep golden brown and releases from the pot by itself, then flip it for a couple of minutes and set it on a plate. It will not be cooked through yet, and that is fine because it goes back in later.
Edna says never wash the pot between steps. Those brown, sticky bits on the bottom are flavor, what cooks down there call the good stuff. The sausage goes in next and browns for about 4 minutes in the chicken fat, then it joins the chicken on the plate. You want a few tablespoons of seasoned fat left, so spoon off the extra if you have more than three or four, or add a little oil or bacon drippings if you have too little.
Vegetables, Hot Stock And The Big Mama Trick
Into the hot fat go the onion, green pepper and celery, which she calls the trinity. Scrape up the brown bits as they soften, about 5 minutes, then stir in the garlic, thyme and bay leaf for just 30 seconds, because burnt garlic turns bitter. Now comes the step that Edna says was Big Mama’s secret. Before any liquid goes in, pour in the 2 cups of drained rice and stir it in the seasoned fat, keeping it moving every 20 or 30 seconds, for about 3 minutes.
The grains go from chalky white to a pale see-through look and then a soft ivory. You can hear the change too, as the sound goes from wet and quiet to drier and louder, with the grains ticking against the pot like little pebbles. When you hear that ticking and smell something nutty, like toast, it is time for the stock.
Edna explains the why. Toasting puts flavor on the grain itself, and the fat coats each grain so the starch stays put instead of melting off into the liquid. In her words, boil it and the rice cooks in glue, toast it first and the rice cooks in flavor.
The stock goes in hot, four cups for two cups of rice, measured level. She warms it in a small pan or the microwave, because cold stock drops the pot’s temperature and leaves the rice soaking instead of cooking. Taste it first, too. Rice takes its salt in the pot, so add a teaspoon of salt if your stock is unsalted, and hold off if it is the salty store-bought kind.
Stir Once, Cover Tight And Leave It Alone
Once the stock is in, stir one time to settle everything. Bring the pot to a gentle simmer, nestle the chicken and sausage down into the rice, put the lid on tight and turn the heat to low for 25 minutes. Edna says every lift of the lid lets the steam escape, and every pass of the spoon rubs starch into the liquid, which is where gummy rice comes from. If your stove runs hot, hold the heat as low as it will go.
When time is up, turn off the fire and keep the lid on for 10 more minutes. She says rice served straight off the heat is wet on the bottom and a little hard on top, while the same pot ten minutes later falls apart into separate grains. Check that the thighs read at least 175 degrees on a thermometer, which makes them tender, though the food safe minimum for chicken is 165. Stir in the butter with a fork, never a spoon, because a fork lifts the grains and a spoon smears them.
Serve It Like Big Mama Did
Big Mama used to say the meat is the seasoning and the rice is the supper. So Edna does not pull the chicken onto a separate plate. She piles it right on top of the rice, scoops from the bottom where the best flavor lives, and adds hot sauce, chopped green onion or parsley, with cornbread or greens on the side. And if a golden crust forms on the bottom of the pot, she says that goes to the cook.
When The Pot Goes Wrong
Edna says every one of these has happened in her own kitchen. Mushy and clumped rice means too much liquid or a spoon in the pot after the stock. Gummy rice means it was not rinsed or the toasting was rushed. If the grains are still hard in the middle, the heat was too high or the lid was not sealing, and a quarter cup of hot stock or water with 10 more minutes covered will fix it. Pale, bland rice means the browning was cut short or the stock was not salted enough.
Leftovers deserve care too. In Big Mama’s house yesterday’s rice went into a skillet the next morning with an egg on top, into soup or into a stuffed pepper. Edna adds that cooked rice should not sit out on the stove all night, because it can carry bacteria that survive cooking and grow at room temperature. Get it into shallow containers and into the refrigerator within an hour, where it keeps three or four days, and reheat it until steaming hot all the way through, 165 degrees on a thermometer.
Her challenge is simple. Cook one pot this week and change only two things: toast the rice in the fat until you hear it tick, and once the lid goes on, do not touch it until the rest is over. She says nobody in your family ever needed to boil their rice in plain water, they only needed to treat it like the main event.
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