Knowledge Base > Char Nolan - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
Char Nolan - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
This event was on
Tuesday, March 10, 2026 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Char Nolan in her virtual office as she welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to ask anything – from cooking techniques to cou… Read More.
Question:
I may be misunderstanding something about cooking brown rice. I’ve read there are methods like starting rice in cold water or adding rice to boiling water. What does “hot rice” mean, and when?
— yonatan gibli
Answer:
So I lived in Brazil for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer and thought that I knew everything about cooking rice and how Brazil Brazilians cook rice is you take the quantity that you want and you put it in maybe a bowl just like this, and you fill it with tepid water and you swirl it around and swirl it around and swirl it around so that you redo, remove any dust or anything that might be on the rice. And what they do in Brazil is they add a little bit of oil to a pan and they let it heat up. And then they, I would use this word, they saute the rice for maybe two minutes just to sort of get it a little caramelized so that it has a richer flavor and then they boil it with the same exact ratio that we use. If you have a cup of rice, they're going to use two cups of water, and that's the way they do it in Brazil. I wanna say that today I have, um, a rice cooker, which I rely on heavily and let it do all of the work, but I always clean the rice first before I put it into the well of the rice cooker. Now your next question of what is hot rice? Um, I'm not exactly sure what that means because there are so many explanations of what it could be. So if you want to send me an email, which would be Char Char@rouxbe.com, I will investigate that question with several others of our instructors who might be more well informed than I'm.