A few failures can intimidate anyone, yet cooking rice to perfection, once you learn it, is one of the easiest and most fool-proof kitchen tasks, next to boiling water. Remember one thing-rice cooking leaves very little latitude for errors or carelessness.

Learn a good rice cooking technique, practice it and stick with it (pun unintended). You’ll invariably end up with fluffy, perfectly-cooked rice grains that are neither dry nor soggy or sticky. And if it is sticky rice you are after, you will get the stickiest, gummiest rice that stays on your chopsticks in good-size lumps instead of two or three grains at a time.

Have a rice-cooking marathon to get thoroughly familiar with the technique. Get a pound or two ( a kilo) of rice and play hooky from work for a couple of hours. Start with the recipe here, then vary your technique to suit your taste until you judge the finished product perfect for your taste and your purposes.

Rice cooking varies slightly depending on your water, variety of rice, humidity (i.e. how much moisture rice grains retain) and how hot your lowest burner setting is. And some people like rice slightly al dente, others soft. Keep cooking batches of rice until you have exactly the way you like it, noting for each batch the amount of water you used and cooking time. It is a very cheap lesson, since rice is so inexpensive, and it only takes a few hours.

Feed your dog or cat any poor results and tell them that all Asian pets live mainly on rice. They don’t know the difference between good and bad rice and it is good for them (many canned cat and dog food filler is rice).

Each cookbook’s rice cooking technique is different. One variable, the amount of water to use so the rice absorbs the last drop at the end of the cooking period, changes with the age of the rice. Younger rice has a higher moisture content, so use slightly less water. But virtually all rice we buy has passed the young-rice stage.

The large variety of cooking techniques probably originated in Asia. There are many Asian rice-eating nations, and each culture prefers a different end result. Many people in parts of Asia prefer a long-grain, fluffy, dry rice. But even these people don’t agree on their cooking techniques.

In Pakistan, India, Burma and Sri Lanka they cook rice with salt.In Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam they cook it without salt. Going further east, Cambodia, Korea, China and Japan prefer a medium or short-grain variety that cooks up fluffy but moist with the grains sticking together. They add no salt to the water. In Laos, they eat glutinous rice as the everyday staple, not just in sweet preparations.

In Western cookbooks, the recommended cooking time for white rice varies from 15 to 30 minutes. Your guess is as good as anyone’s why this broad range.

Another area of complete disagreement is whether to rinse the rice before cooking.Asians often do this simply because their rice is not pre-cleaned. With better processing techniques clean rice is now available more readily in Asia. Rice we buy in the U.S. is always clean and you save a step by not rinsing it before cooking.

Another argument for pre-rinsers is to remove any surface starch that would make the cooked rice sticky. Rinsing advocates swear that rinsing until the water runs clear (starch in the rinsing water turns it milky) gives the fluffiest, driest, least sticky grains possible. Non-rinsers argue that rinsing washes away most of the nutrients, particularly the three B vitamins. Nutritional researchers agree. Laboratory experiments confirmed that much of the valuable vitamins end up in the rinse water with extensive rinsing.

So do you want vitamin-rich rice or non-sticky rice?

To settle the controversy, I cooked identical rice in identical pots, one after a thorough rinse and one straight from the bin. I found no perceivable difference in stickiness or in any other culinary properties between the two pots of cooked rice. My recommendation-don’t rinse the vitamins away and save an unnecessary step.

There are three different ways to cook rice in your kitchen (not including the rice cooker). One way is to cook it like pasta, in plenty of boiling salted water. When it is cooked, pour water and rice into a colander, drain well and serve. This is not the easiest, and much of the nutrients in the rice end up in the cooking water. But the method is foolproof.

Then you can . Combine rice, measured water and salt, and bake, tightly covered, in a 350°F (180°C) oven for 25 to 30 minutes (if you are using brown rice, give it an hour). Uncover and let bake for a few more minutes to evaporate any residual moisture. Simple.

The best and easiest method is the absorption (some cooks call it steaming) method. Put unrinsed rice into measured boiling salted water, cover, turn the heat low and cook for 15 minutes. Then let the pot sit covered, off the heat for 5 minutes. The proportions are 1 cup rice, 1½ cups water and ½ teaspoon salt. Fluff gently with two forks and the rice is ready to eat. This amount serves four people.

If you are cooking more than one cup of raw long-grain rice, for each additional cup of rice you only add 1¼ cups of water, not 1½. The amount of salt remains ½ teaspoon for every cup of rice. For short-grain rice the cooking technique and amount of water is the same, but for each additional cup of rice add only 1 cup of water.

Brown rice takes longer to cook because of the fibrous bran layer that cover the grains needs longer time to soften. The amount of water and salt are the same as for long-grain rice. Most brown rice cooks in 40 minutes.

Glutinous rice is not cooked in water but steamed. I don’t know the reason, possible it is tradition. The less common Asian variety, black glutinous rice, on the other hand, they always cook in water.

Both the absorption method and oven cooking rice, by the way, retain all nutrients.