The 10-Second Restaurant Trick for Perfect Fluffy Rice Every Time

For something so seemingly simple, cooking really good rice on the stovetop can be irritatingly hard. It requires just two ingredients—rice and water—but preparing it perfectly can be awfully elusive, with many questions to answer and problems to solve—whether or not to soak the grains or rinse them before cooking, whether to gently steam the rice or vigorously boil it, and many rice to water ratios to consider.

While I love sticky rice when it's meant to be sticky, when I'm cooking long-grain rice I want it to be fluffy and perfectly tender, with each individual cooked grain distinct, not clumped together. While I love my rice cooker, my go-to weeknight rice routine is cooking rice on the stovetop, and I always use this one simple trick that I learned almost two decades ago when I was working in restaurant kitchens. 

To ensure light, separated grains of long-grain rice, I go through all the proper steps: I always remove surface starch by soaking the raw grains in water and then rinsing and repeating the process until the water runs clear: I use the proper ratio by volume of water to rice, depending on the type of rice (a one-to-one ratio by volume of water to rice for white rice and two-to-one for brown rice); and I cook the rice gently over low heat to ensure evenly cooked grains and to prevent excessive water evaporation. But all of this effort to cook rice perfectly is for naught if water pours from the lid onto the rice when I lift the lid off the pot after cooking—if that happens all those grains that I worked so hard to make fluffy are now wet, clumped, and gummy.

But there is a solution and it’s probably hanging in your kitchen right now: A clean kitchen towel. I first learned this kitchen towel trick for cooking rice when I was a line cook in restaurant kitchens almost 20 years ago, and I’ve been using this technique at home ever since whenever I cook rice on the stovetop. It guarantees fluffy, perfectly cooked rice every time. 

The trick is to simply place a clean kitchen towel under the lid of a pot of cooked rice as soon as it's removed from heat. I then place the lid back on the pot right over the towel and let the rice sit untouched for at least 10 minutes before fluffing it with a fork. As the rice finishes absorbing moisture and cooking off the heat, the kitchen towel traps condensation from the steam, instead of letting it pool inside the lid and drip back onto the rice, thus preventing the rice from becoming sticky.

I really like the extra insurance policy this kitchen towel trick gives me when cooking stovetop rice. And the method works well with more than just plain white rice. Use it with stovetop rice pilafs, arroz con pollo, brown rice, or any other rice dish in which you want to eliminate excess moisture. It’s a small extra step, but an important one to ensure perfectly cooked, well separated grains of rice that are ready to be fluffed and served.