How to Cook Wild Rice in a Rice Cooker

Wild rice is not really rice

Before the ratio, the key fact: wild rice is not rice at all. It is the seed of an aquatic grass, with a tough outer bran and a chewy, nutty grain, so it behaves nothing like the white rice in our rice-to-water ratio guide. It is closest to brown ricein how much water and time it needs — more of both — and getting that right is the whole difference between tender and stubbornly tough.

Use about three times the water, and the long setting

Rinse the wild rice, then use a generous 1:3 ratio— about three cups of water for every cup of wild rice, far more than white rice's roughly 1:1.5. Run the brown-rice setting if your cooker has one, or the longest cook cycle available; a fuzzy-logic cooker like the Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzymanages the long, gentle cook better than a basic on/off model. Because there is extra water, do not fill past the cooker's max line.

Expect a second cycle, and cook to the split

Wild rice can take 45 minutes to an hour, which is longer than a single white-rice cycle on many cookers — so if the cooker clicks to warm and the grains are still tough, simply run it again, adding a splash more hot water if it looks dry. The doneness cue is visual: wild rice is ready when the grains have split open to show the paler inside and are tender but still chewy. Undercooked wild rice is unpleasantly hard, so err toward more time. Drain any water left over at the end, since wild rice does not always absorb it all.

A note on wild-rice blends