Brown Rice with Vegetables – Easy Healthy Side Dish

Brown Rice with Vegetables

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Rice is the staple food for almost half of the people on Earth. What we are used to calling rice, those beautiful white or pearly grains of various shapes, is in fact processed rice: polished rice grains.

Brown rice, or unpolished rice, which is sometimes wrongly called wild rice, is what you get after the inedible hull, or simply the husk, is removed: brownish grains.

Unpolished, brown rice is an excellent food for healthy eating. Its high content of trace elements and vitamins makes it a wonderful dietary product. Be sure to try cooking rice with carrots using this kind of rice.

I remember reading in some book as a child a story about sailors: on a warship on a long voyage, people suffered from diseases that struck only the ship’s officers and spared the seamen. The reason was that the seamen ate unpolished rice, which keeps the hull layer containing most of the vitamins, if I’m not mistaken B6, B12, A, E, PP, folic acid and so on.

This rice is now easy to find and often sold. Let’s cook unpolished rice with vegetables, as a side dish for meat or as a main dish.

Brown rice takes longer to cook than polished rice, apparently because the hull contains less starch. Keep this in mind when cooking.

More with bell peppers and rice

Ingredients

2 servings

  • Unpolished rice 1 cup (180 g)
  • Boiling water 2 cups (400 ml)
  • Garlic 1 head
  • Onion 1
  • Bell pepper 1
  • Mild hot pepper 1–2 pods (optional)
  • Corn (canned, small) 1 small can
  • Carrot 1
  • Vegetable oil 3-4 tbsp
  • Spices: black pepper, salt, coriander, hot ground pepper, sweet paprika to taste

Step-by-step recipe

Preparation

  1. Peel the onion and carrot. Dice the onion into medium cubes, and dice the carrot too. Remove the seeds from the bell pepper and cut it into small cubes or strips.

    Vegetables for the dish.

  2. Separate the garlic into cloves, but don’t peel them.

  3. Rinse the brown rice under cold running water and soak it in cold water for 15–20 minutes.

    Unlike white rice, unpolished rice has no rice “flour” that takes a long time to wash out. But you can’t rule out husks and various debris, so it’s best to rinse the rice well.

    Unpolished brown rice.

Vegetables

  1. Heat the vegetable oil in a sauté pan. Right away add the chopped onion and garlic cloves and fry everything over medium heat for 5 minutes.

    Heat the vegetable oil in a sauté pan and add the chopped onion.

  2. Add the chopped carrot and, if you like, 1–2 small mild hot peppers. Stir and fry over medium heat for 5 minutes.

    Adding the chopped carrot.

  3. Add the chopped red bell pepper.

    Adding the chopped red bell pepper.

  4. Stir everything and keep stewing over medium heat, uncovered, for about 10–12 minutes. Stir fairly often so nothing burns and everything cooks evenly.

  5. Add the entire contents of the can of corn, including the liquid. Stir and keep cooking for a few more minutes. In the end all the vegetables should be soft.

    Adding the entire contents of the can of corn.

  6. Add salt, pepper, and ground coriander and hot ground pepper to taste. For a deeper color you can add turmeric, saffron or 0.5 tsp of sweet ground paprika.

    Adding the spices.

Rice

  1. Drain the rice and add it to the vegetables. Stir everything thoroughly and stew for 5–6 minutes, stirring.

    Adding the rinsed brown rice.

  2. Now an important point! Pour in hot water: for this amount of vegetables and rice you need 2 cups of boiling water (400 ml). Cover with a lid and, once it comes to a full boil, turn the heat under the sauté pan down to the minimum. The liquid should barely simmer.

    Adding hot water.

  3. Cook covered over the lowest heat for at least 40 minutes, then start tasting. There will be enough liquid, so no need to add more. At the very end, if some liquid remains, just take off the lid and let the water evaporate completely.

    Brown rice usually takes two or even three times longer to cook than white. Cooking time can be up to 1 hour. What matters is that the rice is fully cooked and the water is completely absorbed and evaporated.

    If your vegetables get overcooked in that time, you can cook the rice separately and mix it with the cooked vegetables; that’s a common way to do it.

Serving

  1. Serve brown rice with vegetables only hot, straight from the heat.

    Brown rice.

    This is not a crumbly pilaf, and as it cools it will simply stick into a lump. But hot, it is incredibly tasty, spicy and aromatic.

    rice with vegetables

Calories and macros

725 kcal

Serving ≈ 610 g

  • Protein13 g7% of kcal
  • Fat29 g37% of kcal
  • Carbs98 g56% of kcal

100 g119 kcalProtein 2.1 gFat 4.8 gCarbs 16.1 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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