Instant Pot Mexican Rice

Rice arrived in Mexico with the Spanish conquistadors in the years following the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. The Spanish brought it from their colonies in the Caribbean, where it had arrived from Asia via the Manila Galleon trade route — a grain that had traveled from China to the Philippines to the Caribbean to Mexico in the course of a single century. The indigenous cooks of Oaxaca, accustomed to the corn and bean traditions of Mesoamerica, encountered rice and immediately understood it as a new canvas for their existing spice vocabulary. The technique of toasting the rice dry in a pan before adding liquid — which is the defining step of Mexican rice and which distinguishes it from every other rice-cooking tradition in the world — was developed in the colonial kitchens of the first generation. Toasting deepens the starch at the surface, creating a shell that holds the rice grain intact through the cooking process and produces a dish of distinct, separate grains rather than the sticky mass that untoasted rice becomes. The tomato, the cumin, the garlic: all cooked into the liquid that the rice then absorbs completely. The Instant Pot delivers this in a fraction of the stovetop time, the pressure forcing the rice to absorb the tomato broth so thoroughly that each grain is colored and flavored all the way through.