Cook the rice in a mixture of water and sauce with a sausage on top. By the time the rice is done, it has soaked up flavors of the sausage. Just scoop rice onto a plate (or into a bowl), cut the sausage into slices and arrange on top of the rice.
Originally meant to make good use of leftover sauce of a beef stew, I never realized that using a simple technique using a rice cooker would give birth to a dozen ideas.
You see, the flavor of the rice will vary depending on the sauce and sausage you use. In this case, I had leftover sauce from an Italian-inspired meat stew.
I just rinsed the rice, put it in the rice cooker, added water and the sauce. I measured the water and sauce so that, together, they are equal to the amount of liquid that the rice required. Different rice varieties need varying amounts of cooking liquid, after all.
Next, I dropped in a Spanish sausage. I’d have used Italian sausage but Spanish was all I had that day. Both the sauce and the sausage were frozen. The sausage skin was pricked with a fork in several spots to allow the fat and juices to get mixed into the rice too.
I turned on the rice cooker and waited until the alarm went off. By that time, the rice has fluffed after soaking up both the water and the sauce. The grains were a uniform orange-y color even though I didn’t stir the rice during cooking. The sausage was cooked through and just needed slicing.
To appreciate the beauty of this cooking technique, consider these substitutions for the sauce and sausage:
- Leftover sauce from Chinese five-spice beef stew with Chinese sausage
- Curry sauce with Thai sausage
- Filipino adobo sauce with garlicky Vigan sausage
And those are just three possibilities. Imagine how many more combinations you can come up with if you have access to more sausage varieties. And any of these variations you can make using a rice cooker. It doesn’t have to be a fancy rice cooker — even the most basic and low-tech models will do.
