"Recipe": Brown rice water sourdough

Reuse, recycle, reduce

Still waiting to secure those recipes & excerpts from Tamar Adler’s The Everlasting Meal Cookbook for Breadcrumb Month, so in the meantime here’s a “recipe” that Adler herself would approve of. I use “recipe” in quotes because I made one minor change to this recipe:

Recipe: Loaf Classic™

But instead of water, I used this stuff:

..which is just the starchy run-off from a pot of brown rice cooked pasta-style in a pressure cooker, my go-to way to make brown rice, because a) it takes a mere 20 minutes and b) it gives a waaaay more tender result.

The bread has a sooooper tender, custardy crumb, and a faint nuttiness, which made it an excellent experiment and something I will definitely do again. I’ll probably create an actual brown rice sourdough for the book, but should you want to recreate it in the meantime, here’s how:

1. Place brown rice and water in a pressure cooker or instapot¹ in a 1:4 ratio by volume, along with a tablespoon of oil and a pinch of salt.

2. Cook for 15m at high pressure, then let the pressure out rapidly.

3. Strain the rice and capture the liquid. Let it cool and stash in the fridge for up to a week in the fridge.

4. Use in any bread recipe (including this one) in place of water without changing the hydration.

5. Profit.

If you need reasons to make brown rice, you could do worse than using it to make kimchi bokkeumbap, which I did:

(For those of you with an ATK subscription, here is my own recipe for it.)

—Andrew

1. You could also do this stovetop, which I’m guessing would take 45-60 minutes.