food+drink

Noreen's Very Lemony Rice

I’ve talked about Noreen’s Lemon Rice before. We find that plain rice gets, well, plain and boring, with curry. This special lemon rice makes any curry (or indeed almost any rice dish) both look and taste special: it is very lemony and a lovely golden yellow colour.

This is doubtless not the approved way to cook rice, but it is easy and it works.


You need:

  • 50-60 gm Long-Grain Rice (Basmati for preference) per person
  • 1 large, or 2 small, Lemons
  • half teaspoon ground Turmeric
  • small pinch Salt (optional)
  • Boiling Water

This is what you do:

  1. Grate the zest from the lemon and put it aside.
  2. Now juice the lemon (not too hard, you want a bit of the flesh left) and put the juice aside as well. Keep the lemon half-shells.
  3. Put the rice in a saucepan with the lemon half-shells. Add the turmeric and a tiny pinch of salt.
  4. Add most of a kettle of boiling water, bring back to the boil, stirring a couple of times to make sure the rice isn’t adhering to the bottom of the pan. Cook until the rice is done.
  5. Just as the rice is done remove the lemon pieces to a plate and scrape the flesh and juice from inside them. Discard the lemon peel.
  6. Drain the rice in a sieve and rinse with some boiling water. Shake to dry and tip it into a warmed dish.
  7. Add all the lemon (zest, juice and recovered flesh) and stir it in gently.
  8. Serve with curry.

Notes:

  1. This method produces a slightly wet, but not sticky, rice, which works fine with curry.
  2. The turmeric gives the rice a lovely bright yellow colour — but it needs the acidity of the lemon to do this. If you leave out the lemon (or in fact anything acid) but not the turmeric the rice comes out a muddy beige colour. That’s all down to the chemistry of the pigments in the turmeric which are yellow in acid but red in alkaline (ie. most tap water). I think the acid also helps fix the colour to the rice grains.
  3. You can do this with lime as well, though the flavour is more subtle.
  4. Or you can cook plain rice this way — just leave out the lemon and turmeric.

Picture credit: Robyn Lee