How do you cook the perfect rice?

Recent tests explain why it’s so hard to cook the perfect cup of rice, debunking the cook’s pithy promise that a two-to-one ratio of water to rice never fails.

The executive editor of Cook’s Science at America’s Test Kitchen and co-author of The Science of Good Cooking, Dan Souza, says the ratio model is a big kitchen myth, the sheer number of failed and consistently awful efforts across the world being his pointed reasoning.

In a bid to find a better way, the scientist and his team placed sealed bags of a cup each of rice and water into boiling water and found that regardless of what type of rice was being used — long grain, brown, jasmine, Japanese, and so on — it always cooked perfectly. His conclusion? It takes a single cup of water to perfectly cook a cup of rice.

He turned to cooks everywhere — both beginner and expert — with advice, explaining that the single issue in the way of perfect rice is chemistry or, more specifically, evaporation. If it were not for the problem of steam escaping, the one-to-one ratio hits perfection every time.

“Evaporation isn’t a consistent thing, cook to cook, kitchen to kitchen,” he told South China Morning Post. “If you have a pot with not a very good lid, you’re going to get more evaporation. If it’s really tight, you’re going to get less evaporation.”

Things become more complicated if you’re feeding a crowd and need to double, or triple, the recipe. The size of pot affects the cooking time and evaporation, and cooks are often left with too much water or undercooked or mushy grains.

The trick? Limit evaporation. Find a pot with a lid that fits — remembering that even rice cookers face evaporation so require more water — and try to limit the obsessive lifting of the lid. Because while science is to blame, so are cooks around the world who can’t resist a little peek.

This article originally appeared on delicious.com.au