You almost certainly have what you need for better rice hanging in your kitchen right now, so says Leah Colins, senior culinary editor for www.seriouseats.com. It’s Leah’s past experience as a recipe developer and food editor for America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) that gives her the utmost confidence to say this.

She and ATK colleagues spent a lot of time working on how to achieve stovetop fluffy rice consistently. You’d think it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But for something so seemingly simple, cooking really good rice on the stovetop can be irritatingly hard.

Afterall, the job just requires two ingredients—rice and water. Yet preparing it perfectly can be truly elusive: do you pre-soak the grains or rinse them before cooking? Do you gently steam the rice or vigorously boil it? And then there’s the question of ratio—how much rice to water is right?

While sticky rice is great when it's meant to be sticky, clumped-together sticky rice isn’t cool if the result you want is FLUFFY distinct grains! And yes, it’s true that the trusty rice cooker or Instant Pot will turn out a fluffy rice, but what do you do if you don’t have either appliance?

THIS was the question Leah and her fellow ATK pros attempted to answer. If all you have at your disposal is a lidded pot and the stovetop, then here’s their informed advice in three simple steps:

• ALWAYS remove surface starch by soaking the raw grains in water and then rinsing; you repeat this process until the water runs clear.
• Use the proper water to rice ratio: a one-to-one ratio by volume of water to rice for white rice and two-to-one for brown rice.
• Cook the rice gently over low heat to ensure evenly cooked grains and to prevent excessive water evaporation.

But following these three steps is for naught if water pours from the lid onto the rice when I lift the lid off the pot after cooking. When that happens, all those grains that you worked so hard to make fluffy are now wet, clumped, and gummy.

The solution? A clean kitchen towel. It guarantees fluffy, perfectly cooked rice every time. Simply place a clean kitchen towel under the lid of a pot of cooked rice as soon as it's removed from heat. Then place the lid back on the pot right over the towel and let the rice sit untouched for at least 10 minutes before fluffing it with a fork.

As the rice finishes absorbing moisture and cooking off the heat, the towel traps condensation from the steam, instead of letting it pool inside the lid and drip back onto the rice, thus preventing the rice from becoming sticky.

Leah says this kitchen towel trick is your insurance policy when cooking stovetop rice. And the method works well with more than just plain white rice. Use it with stovetop rice pilafs, arroz con pollo, brown rice, or any other rice dish in which you want to eliminate excess moisture.