I got the idea in my head to smoke some rice after reading a thread on Chow.com about baking off pie crusts with rice in them as the weight rather than beans, the logic behind that being that while the beans aren't edible afterwards (at least taste wise), the rice takes on a nice toasted nuttiness, so it's dual purpose. It made me wonder what smoking the rice would do to it. My train of thought can be pretty hard to follow at times, so that's a pretty straight shot for me.


But what to do with the rice after it was smoked? I'm a bit of a Food Network junkie, so I turned to their website, and searched for rice salad (I'm always looking for good side dishes) and found this Brown Rice Salad recipe of Alton Brown's. And guess what? It calls for baked rice. Which could just as easily be smoked! (It also calls for bacon and vinegar, and I think we all know how I feel about those. Awesome!) Just in case that didn't give me the smoky goodness I was looking for (it is covered in foil), I decided to also just smoke a pan of uncovered dry rice, with the use to be decided at a later date. And to be fair, I was planning on just smoking the rice on it's own to begin with, so I was still curious how that would turn out.

The recipe for the baked (now smoked) rice for the salad is incredibly simple. You put 1 1/2 cups of brown rice in a pan, bring 2 1/2 cups of water with 1 tablespoon of unsalted butter and 1 teaspoon of salt to a boil, and then pour it over the rice. You then cover it tightly with foil and bake for an hour at 375ºF.

I was going to be smoking some pork tenderloins along with the rice  (this is going to be in another post), so I wanted to smoke-cook at my Smokette's max temp, until the pork loin was done, to get the rice cooking at as close to the recommended temperature as possible. So that's 250ºF for about an hour and a half. That's a considerably lower temperature than Alton recommends, but I thought that maybe the extra time would make up for it. It really didn't (I've been buying the "quick" brown rice lately, and this was definitely NOT that, and is the slowest cooking stuff ever! You think a pork butt takes forever! Try brown rice! It's, like, 2 and a half hours per cup!).


I put the Rice Salad rice on the top shelf, and it is in a glass baking dish covered in foil. Now, I know what you're thinking, "but how is that going to get any smoke flavoring if it's covered in foil?" Right? I don't know, that's why it's an experiment. If nothing else, I love being able to cook everything that I'm making in the smoker, rather than inside, especially in the summer. I am a fan of not having to turn the oven on when it gets above 80ºF. It's unnecessary to heat up the house any more than it already is, in my opinion, and I think that comes from growing up in Canada (which most people think is backwards, since it's hotter here in Oklahoma, but you have to remember that we don't have air conditioning there, so if you heat up the kitchen, you irreversibly heat up the kitchen, and it can still get uncomfortably hot in July). But I digress. Why heat up the kitchen if you don't have to? Even if if I didn't get smoke flavor on the rice, if the cooking at least worked, it would be a perfect side dish for summer! And the fact that it is a mayo free salad would mean that it's also a lot more picnic/BBQ friendly for the summer months if it would have to sit out for a bit.





Below the Rice Salad rice is my test rice/in-case-the-Rice-Salad-Rice-is-a-bust rice, and below that are my pork tenderloins. I used one small chunk of apple wood in the woodbox for this. If you've read my other blogs, you may have noticed a trend. It's my fave.









When I took the pork out of the smoker at around 145ºF internal temp (I want to say this took about an hour and a half) I went ahead and removed the rice, which was in fact not yet done (still crunchy, and most of the water was still sloshing around), and put it in the oven at 450ºF to finish it up, for about a half an hour.

While it was smoking, I had the time to make the dressing for it, which is super simple, and paired nicely with the honey mustard marinade I did for the pork loin. I must have had that in my subconscious when I decided to do the honey mustard marinade, I'm not that big of a dolt to not notice that pairing on some level. It has bacon, and you cook the red onions in the reserved rendered bacon fat, which smells amazing as soon as they hit the pan! I was shocked at first at the amount of vinegar that the recipe called for (1/2 cup, the same amount as the chicken stock) but once it was composed it was perfect. And especially with the dill, everything balanced out nicely.

It's a pretty liquid-y dressing, so when the rice was finally done, when I stirred it in I did have to let it cook in there for the recommended amount of time to let it set up and soak the dressing in. And viola, it was time to taste! Oh, but before I stirred the rice in, I was definitely able to smell the smoke on the rice, and it was subtly smoky tasting.



The salad was really good. Was it smoky? A little. It was a hint of smoke, but maybe only because I knew it was there, and because I was eating it with smoked meat. I think had I smoked it the entire time, rather than putting it in the oven, it would have been more smoky. My guess is that it would have taken about 3 hours to finish. I think the flavor combination of the salad would be really good with a slightly stronger smoke flavor. As it is, it's tangy and delicious, and the fresh dill is exactly what it needs. So you can be that this will be on my summer BBQ menu, once I figure out how to get that rice to cook right in my smoker!






And the extra rice? This is how it turned out. It's a little darker in color now, and it smells smoky. I think I know how I'm going to use it, and I'm really excited about it. I think I'm going to try it this weekend, and then I'll post about it.

And follow-up: I was watching Top Chef last night (another one of my addictions) that I DVR'd from Wed., and lo and behold, they were using rice in their Quick Fire Challenge! So now I have a whole new slew of ideas that I can play with!