Rice – Are there advantages of soaking rice overnight as opposed to only for 30 minutes

pressure-cookerrice

All these years I've just washed rice, put it into a pressure cooker (a regular pressure cooker; not a rice cooker), added the right amount of water and cooked it until the first whistle. Both for brown rice and white rice.

But when looking up this page on Basmati rice, the author does two things differently.
1. She pre-soaks the rice for 30 minutes.
2. She brings the water to a boil before adding the rice to it.

On searching for more info, this site and this site recommend soaking rice overnight! This completely perplexed me.

Assuming that I want to cook my rice with soaking, how do I choose between soaking for 30 minutes and overnight? Is soaking overnight a safety concern? Is it better to soak it overnight in the fridge? Wont an overnight soaking make it absorb a lot of water and make it less suitable for cooking in a pressure cooker?

Best Answer

In my experiments with steamed rice and broken steamed rice so far, I haven't found any disadvantage to soaking rice overnight. The rice can be kept on the kitchen counter-top (no need for refrigeration). The rice absorbs a bit of water, but that didn't seem to make any difference in the cooking. It absorbed the usual amount of water (4 cups water for 1 cup rice) when cooked in a pressure cooker.
Given what Jean says about arsenic, it's probably better to soak rice overnight, especially if it is being steamed, rather than boiled.