What Happens When You Pre-Soak Brown Rice Before Cooking?

One of the easiest ways to sneak some extra nutrients into your diet is to swap out processed grains that you already eat for their whole grain counterparts, like brown rice in place of white rice. The problem is, brown rice can take as long as 45 minutes to cook from start to finish, and even then if you don't get the water-to-rice ratio right it can still come out crunchy in the center. Thankfully there is a cheat code to quick-cooking brown rice that's perfectly tender: pre-soaking. Just like dried beans, brown rice gets softer if you pre-soak it for at least a few hours before cooking, so with a little forethought you can have brown rice ready for recipes like Mediterranean brown rice salad in half the time.

The secret behind soaking brown rice is softening the chewy, fibrous outer layer of the brown rice grains, which is called the bran. It doesn't take any special skills to soak brown rice, but you may need to adjust the amount of water you use when it's time to cook the rice on the stove.

Pre-soaking brown rice is very easy. Simply submerge the grains in water and let them sit there for at least 90 minutes. Be sure to use enough water to cover the rice plus about an inch. Some people soak their brown rice longer, even overnight, but that's not necessary to get the quick-cooking benefit of a pre-soak. When you're ready to cook the rice, simply drain the soaking water away from the grains, give it a rinse to wash off any extra starch, and it's ready to cook.

Soaked rice can be cooked using a normal brown rice-to-water ratio of 2 to 2 ½ parts water to 1 part rice (which is different than white rice, by the way), but if you've soaked it for a long time you can cut down on the water so that the finished rice doesn't get too sticky. Try shaving off a ¼ of a cup of water for every cup of rice you've soaked for more than two hours, so cook 1 cup of rice with 1 ¾ cups of water instead of 2 cups. It may take a little trial and error to get the ratio right depending on how long you decide to soak, and you should still let it rest after it's cooked, but once you get the formula dialed in you'll never go back to boiling dried brown rice again.