I want to make a rice dish that gets baked – a maqluba, but I want to make half the quantity of the recipe. Do I adjust the baking time? The recipe calls for simmering 30 mins, baking 30 mins, resting 10 mins. It uses raw (soaked) basmati rice. Calls for 1 and 2/3 cups of rice but I’ll cut that in half. I know I’ll need a smaller pot, too.
Rice – How to adjust the cooking time on a baked rice dish if I reduce the recipe by half
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You can use this for 'left-over' batter, or a whole batch:
An Ice Cream Cone:
Based on your edit, my best guess is that this particular rice has a really high amount of surface starch, which gelatinized when you first tried to cook it (liquid from the mushrooms might have been enough to get this result). That would have created a moisture-resistant layer around the grains that inhibited moisture from soaking in further. Your soak would have washed that away and allowed the rice to properly absorb the broth.
That's definitely weird - probably a byproduct of how this particular brand gets processed. A further experiment worth trying would be to briefly rinse off the grains in a colander for your next batch. That would also get rid of surface starch without quite the same effect as a soak. If they work after even a brief rinse, I'd consider that pretty good evidence for this theory.
Another thing you could try might be sauteeing the rice in a completely separate pan from the mushrooms, so that they're exposed only to oil and the surface starch gets toasted instead of gelatinized. Maybe not quite as desirable from a flavor perspective, and of course you'd have to clean another pan, but it's worth testing if you really want to figure out the root of the problem.
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Best Answer
This isn't quite an accurate representation of the recipe. The recipe calls for baking cauliflower and eggplant for 20 minutes each prior to assembly. Once assembled, the rice gets simmered for 30 minutes. Then the completed dish rests for 10 minutes.
The cook times will likely not be significantly affected by cutting the recipe in half.
You may want to check both the phases of cooking about 5 minutes prior to the recipe cook times--but I'd likely recommend doing that even if cooking a full recipe.