How much calory does your rice contain? Depends on how you cook it

Cooking hacks are quite common on the internet, of course, but this one caught Grub’s attention: Two researchers at at Sri Lanka’s College of Chemical Sciences have discovered a way to cook rice so that — almost by magic — it has far fewer calories.

These are the instructions they provided this week at an American Chemical Society conference:

What we did is cook the rice as you normally do, but when the water is boiling, before adding the raw rice, we added coconut oil — about 3 percent of the weight of the rice you’re going to cook. After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That’s it.

They say that any oil would work: Coconut is just what they had on hand. How it works is that the oil-plus-fridge trick makes the sugars harder for the body to chemically absorb. The project isn’t finished yet, but the researchers believe that they can reduce the calories by as much as half. This would be a breakthrough, not just because it makes rice healthier, but also because they think the method might work on other high-calorie starches. Between this and a shot that melts away fat, it’s safe to say the future looks gloriously lazy.