This Absurdly Easy Rice Recipe Is for Mushroom-Lovers
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Fun fact: Mushrooms and rice are best friends, and when you put them together they complement each other beautifully and both become more than they were on their own. Mushrooms are tiny buttons of umami, and if you brown them nicely in a pan they will expel flavor in every direction, which makes them a perfect match for rice, which absorbs any flavor in the vicinity. When cooked together as in this hearty mushroom rice, they turn into a beautiful side dish.
The recipe starts with a pound-and-a-half of mushrooms. It does not matter what kind of mushrooms you use. You could use fancy mushrooms from the farmers market, or just plain button mushrooms. If you find them on sale, that’s even better, because then you can get more.
Start by slicing the mushrooms and sautéing them in olive oil until they’re nice and brown. Mushrooms don’t tend to brown well when they’re crowded in a pan, so with a recipe full of this many mushrooms, you’ll probably want to work in stages. Cooking in stages is a good idea anyway, though, because the author recommends setting half the browned mushrooms aside to stir back into the rice right when it’s finished cooking.
Then sauté some garlic and onions in butter until they’re translucent and add uncooked long-grain rice with vegetable stock and scrape the bottom of the pan so all the mushroom remnants mix in with the broth and rice. Then let the rice cook in the broth, garlic, onions, and mushrooms until all the broth has been absorbed.
Once the broth has been absorbed, the reserved mushrooms go back into the pot. The mushrooms that were simmered in the broth tend to lose a bit of color in the process, so this makes sure the dish stays nice-looking and full of clear, browned mushrooms. Let it stand for 10 minutes to let all the flavors meld, and you’ll have a wonderful pot full of mushroomy goodness.
Get the recipe: Mushroom Rice from Recipe Tin Eats
