What are the secret of keeping cooked rice soft and nice for several days in the fridge without the rice turning hard?

Question

As any busy person would understand how important it is to cook food beforehand and store them in the fridge for few days so that everyday after work, a person could quickly microwave the food and eat them. This will give us extra time to continue doing other household work rather than just having to cook rice for every single meal. I personally love eating rice, so do millions of other people in the world.

But many people does face the same problem as I do when it comes to storing cooked rice in a container inside a fridge for a few days. If the rice was consumed right after it is made, it taste great since it is soft and sticky as of yet. If you store the cooked rice in a container inside a fridge for a few days, the cooked rice turns really hard and it becomes difficult to even dig out the rice using a spatula spoon. What I do is I put some clean water on the rice either sprinkling some water or simply pouring some water. This will loosen the rice a bit allowing me to scoop out some rice with some difficulty still. Then I microwave the rice which then makes them soft and ready to be eaten.

The problem with this method is that it is quite difficult to scoop out rice with a spatula spoon when the rice is hard. At times often I drop quite some amount of rice on the floor or on the ground while struggling to scoop out the rice from the container. So, if there is an easier way out there on the internet that could possibly makes things easier to scoop out rice from a container when the rice is hard, I would very much appreciate it.

Answer 1

Cooked rice when left exposed to the air for a day turns hard. So in order to prevent cooked rice from turning hard, if you want to keep rice for longer period of time, what you need to do is to first let the cooked rice cool down for about 4 hours. But before you allow the rice to cool down, you need to scoop them out of the rice cooker inner pot as soon as the rice is done cooking. This is done because it will still be hot and soft to scoop out the rice. If you decide to scoop out the rice from the inner rice bowl of the rice cooker when it cools down, you are making a mistake. The rice would have turned hard and you will find it very tough to scoop them out.

You then put the rice in a container like this one below:

Allow the rice to cool for about 4 hours or more.

Just before you put the rice into the fridge, take a spatula and loosen the rice throughout inside the storage container. Then you put the container into the fridge. In case if you don't know what a rice spatula looks like:

When you need to warm the rice to eat, you can simply pour a small amount of water into the rice container and use the rice spatula to scoop out whatever amount that you want to eat. Pouring water helps to loosen up the rice further.

Answer 2

Watch video on "How to store cooked rice and how to reheat them to maintain the softness of the rice":