How to make tasty pots of rice in your new Instant Pot

Your new Instant Pot is a great rice cooker, too. You just have to know the right way to use it.

Measure out the amount of rice you'd like to cook. The 180ml measuring cup that came with your Instant Pot is best, but you can use other cups. Just remember to stick with a 1:1 ratio of rice to water. Use the same cup to measure water that you did for rice.

Rinse your rice to remove excess starch and debris. You can rinse rice in the steel inner pot by hand or use a rice strainer like this one.

Add your rinsed rice to the pot. A special rice strainer like this one sometimes comes in handy. It also guards against losing grains. As the old wives' tales go, losing just a few grains is big time bad luck.

There's one advantage to using that special rice cup that came with your Instant Pot. Just fill the liner up to the water level that matches the cups of rice added.

Here's my pot of nicely cooked American-style long-grain rice. Notice the little holes on the surface of the rice bed. That's a good sign the rice is cooked through completely.

I used a fork to fluff my batch of American-style long grain white rice. Fluffing is important because it mixes in any leftover moisture that may be sitting on the bottom of the pot.

My short-grain Japanese rice turned out well, too. Of course you can tweak the recipe to your particular tastes. Just remember to use the 1:1 (rice to water) ratio as your baseline.