I'm used to cooking basmati, which can stand on its own with just a few spices and a little butter. With jasmine rice, I come away disappointed; the rice never seems to bring anything to the dish, and generally comes off a little bland, even with fairly potent flavorings.
Is there some technique or trick specific to jasmine rice that I should be using? Are there particularly good flavor/ingredient combos for jasmine rice I can use?
Not sure how much rice you are making, but if making about 2 cups of rice, first heat 3 tablespoons of peanut oil over Medium High heat. Add the rice and toast it in the oil until it releases a nutty fragrance - about 1-2 minutes. Then I like to use Chicken stock (3 cups) to finish it off. Personal preference but I like to add scallions (green onions) and cilantro to the rice when it is done. Cooking it this way I have not noticed a tremendous taste difference from different brands of Jasmine Rice.
A few things come to mind:
Before cooking:
Cook the rice in coconut milk, maybe with a piece of ginger
or
Put a teaspoon or two of cumin seeds in the cooking water
After cooking:
Mix with fried scallions, ginger and mustard or cumin seeds
Jasmine is specific as it has high GI index. As for the flavor, it is a bit bland on top, but should have a floral fragrance, so it is perfect for Thai, Indonesian, Malay and other far east recipes where you have very strong sauces or tastes from the main dish (where basmati would be best for Indian and middle eastern dishes).
NOTE: I would not call myself a cook, but my Thai friend, whom I would, used to use a mix of three types of rice, some for texture and some for taste (SEA dishes). Also, I must say that I got aware of subtleties in taste of rice only after few months of heavy rice diet.
Although I have not tried this with jasmine rice, I think you can try cooking it like the Indian pulao. In a tbsp or two of neutral vegetable oil fry 2-3 cloves, 1-2 inches of cinnamon, and 4-5 whole cardamom pods. When spices release their flavor, add jasmine rice soaked for roughly half hour and drained. Fry the rice for a couple of minutes and then cook it in water, as you would usually do. The aromatic spices will impart a nice flavor to the rice. Alternatively, you can also add star anise or fried onion.
In my experience, it at least partly depends on where you buy your jasmine rice. If you buy it at a large American grocery store chain, you'll get something bland. I don't know where they get it or what they do to it, but it has no smell or flavor. If you buy it at a small Asian grocery, it will taste and smell very good, and complement the dishes you serve it with.
Replace your rice water with stock.
Vegetarian/vegan? Use vegetable stock instead. Other liquids to intensify the flavor--rice wine, rice vinegar, soy sauce. I'm sure you could use the Western style wines/vinegars too, though I haven't tried with those specifically.
allnet's answers cover the rest of what I would say: basically toasting the rice and using herbs/spices.
What I ended up doing, which worked well:
My girlfriend called the final result the best of my cooking experiments, after chicken breaded with pakora batter. Thank you everyone that had suggestions!
I think toasting the rice made the biggest difference from previous versions. The rice released a very delicious flavor and smell. I could have used even more onion and garlic; although I thought the amount excessive based on the smell when cooking, the actual flavor was fairly mild afterward.
I will experiment with adding toasted cumin, mustard seeds, and ginger to my current result. Don't have good (read: homemade not crappy grocery store) stock or scallions to play with right now.
Tilda Rice & Spice guide suggests jasmine rise teams perfectly with ginger, lemongrass, galangal, lime, green chilli and kaffir lime leaves. So maybe try ginger instead of star anise, which is a better match for basmati.
This seems to be a cultural issue. I live in Indonesia and most here rice is related to jasmine in GI, but is I guess a less flavoursome cheaper strain. The texture and bland flavour is familiar and is a conduit for curries, sauces, and for frying in rice itself. The rice I could only describe as bland. In other countries I'd buy Jasmine rice, which is more aromatic than what we get here. Since the rice is simply cooked plain with only water, no salt or oil or anything at all, references to basmati 'standing on its own with just a few spices and butter' are a little bizarre to me. The rice isn't supposed to stand on its own. You put things on it - a curry sauce might be strongly flavoured on its own but when mixed with rice it softens it and the bland and the strong balance out.
From what I can see the main advantage of jasmine over cheaper strains is that it has a pleasant aroma, but if you cook it with a bunch of aromatics it's less likely that you'd notice this.
If you only ever eat rice as 'pilau rice', 'egg fried rice' and so on, and never have it plain then it might be that jasmine rice is not worth it for you.
I dislike basmati because I am used to eating steamed, high GI rice, and I just cook rice in a rice cooker plain, and basmati is not particularly well suited to that.
Also I'd mention that people here eat 200kg of rice a year, three times a day, and the purpose originally is as a source of carbs (fuel) for people working. Actually my dogs eat rice too, and if you have a daily requirement of 2500 calories or whatever, then rice immediately fills over half than that, providing carb, calories and a little protein as well, so you know that your family gets through a 50kg bag every couple of weeks or whatever, it's a significant thing in a family budget given that the price is fixed by the government.
