Cooked rice is fine — and softer than the alternative
Yes, chickens can eat cooked rice, and it disappears at speed. The famous warning that rice swells inside birds and bursts them is a myth that belongs to wedding confetti folklore, not poultry keeping; birds process grain far too quickly for that story to work. Cooked rice is still the better way to serve it: the grains are soft, easy for beaks to break up, gentle through the crop, and far less likely to be scratched into the bedding and wasted than hard dry rice.
What rice brings to the bowl
Rice is essentially stored energy: starch, a little fibre if it is brown, and not much else. It contains modest protein at best and none of the calcium a laying hen burns through daily, so it can fill a crop without feeding the bird in any lasting sense. Brown rice keeps more of its fibre and B vitamins than white; white rice is the blander, more digestible option, useful when you simply want something plain in front of a flock. Either way, rice earns its place as a vehicle — a warm base that carries chopped greens or a few mealworms into hens who might otherwise ignore them.
Plain, fresh and unseasoned: the serving rules
Cook it in water and nothing else. Rice destined for the flock should carry no salt, no butter or oil, no stock cube, and none of the fried-rice treatment from the family pan — salty, greasy food is hard on poultry digestion. Let a hot batch cool until it is merely warm before it goes out; food served steaming can scald a crop. Serve it in a shallow dish rather than scattered on bare ground, because cooked rice trodden into mud becomes tomorrow's hygiene problem. Mix it with feed or greens rather than offering a dish of rice alone, so the treat stays a topping on the ration instead of replacing it.
Serve it the same day
Cooked rice spoils faster than almost anything else on the treat list. Left sitting in a warm run it sours, grows mould and draws flies and wild birds, and a dish forgotten overnight is a dish of bacteria by morning. Offer only what the flock will clear within the hour, and lift whatever remains when you do the evening round. The same rule applies in the fridge at home: rice you would no longer serve the family because it has sat too long has no business going to the hens either.
A kind use: the hen who is off her feed
Warm, plain rice cooked soft and loose with extra water is one of the first things a convalescing hen will often peck at, mixed with a little of her normal feed. It is a bridge back to eating, not a treatment, and a hen who will not touch even warm rice, or who sits fluffed, hunched and quiet, needs a vet rather than another recipe.
The trouble with rice is that it appears whenever the family has leftovers, which can be four nights a week; putting rice on the treat list in KinsLe's Care Teams turns those leftovers into a planned twice-a-week event the whole household can see.