Arroz a la mexicana / Rice Mexican-style

Preparing Mexican-style rice is more about the process than the actual ingredients. Once you get the process down you can say good-bye to boring rice forever!

Traditionally Mexicans start with long grain white rice, but since I only have enough storage space for one type of rice, I use Thai jasmine rice, and it seems to work just fine.

Step 1. Prepare the flavouring mix in your blender. This can be all sorts of Mexican-inspired ingredients: canned tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, parsley, chiles, etc. In our ‘Food of Puebla’ class we made a Puebla-style rice with canned tomatoes, chopped onion, crushed garlic and salt, and then added just enough broth to allow the blender to liquefy the ingredients.

Step 2. To remove the starch from the rice, we rinsed it in a sieve until the water no longer ran cloudy.

Step 3. Then we fried the rice in hot oil until it turned opaque.

Step 4. We added the blended tomatoes, onion, garlic, etc. to the ‘fried’ rice plus a couple of cups of broth. (Follow instructions on the rice package for correct amounts of liquid vs. rice). At this point we also added fresh peas, chopped carrots and sprigs of cilantro.

the Mexican-style rice begins with a mix of blended tomatoes, onion, garlic, salt and broth

a mix of blended tomatoes, onion, garlic, salt and water, peas, cilantro and carrots are added to the fried rice

Step 5. Once the rice had been brought to a boil, the heat was turned down and the rice was simmered for about 20 minutes with the pot left uncovered. Once small ‘holes’ started forming in the rice, we covered the pot and let it boil for another 5 minutes.

Step 6. Turning the heat off, we let the rice sit for another 20 minutes until all the liquid had been absorbed.

The finished Mexican-style rice…