Talking Points From Today's Telly

[Gillthepainter Profile Website]

Oooooo
That's a good idea.

[Badger's Mate Profile]

Maybe there is a dryness tester of some description which could do the job.

There used to be something called a 'Speedy' moisture tester, that relied on the reaction between calcium carbide and water to produce acetylene. A fixed amount of sample to be tested was put into the device, which was an airtight bottle with a pressure gauge on it. A scoop of powder was added and the lid closed. The sample and powder were shaken together and the amount of acetylene produced (dependent upon the moisture content) was measured by the pressure gauge.

There are more modern methods nowadays. You could always use an oven and an accurate set of scales.


However, whilst that could be used to measure the water content or dryness of food samples I'm not sure if small differences in moisture content would necessarily be the reason that some rice absorbs significantly more or less water when cooking.

[Sakkarin Profile]

that relied on the reaction between calcium carbide and water to produce acetylene

...and it would come in handy for welding my leaky exhaust too

[Stokey Sue Profile]

Surely with rice we need to know how much water it is going to absorb, not how much is there at the start?

This could be done quite simply by cooking a known weight of rice (say 100 g) in a litre of water, draining then weighing again.

I’m not sure this would tell you exactly how much water would be needed to cook perfectly by absorption, but I suppose if you did it with different rices you could eventually find the correlation

Tedious and wasteful possibly but quite doable