I make a shehakal when I eat rice. Today I was eating a rice dish mixed with vegetables that were easily seeable and really more important to the dish. After I made the hadoma, it occured to me that i should -not- make my usual bracha on the rice since many hold that the rice is hadoma. So i skipped the shehakal. Was that the correct way to go? Or should i have made a shehakal on the whole dish and take a forkfull of rice and veggies, thereby somewhat covering the veggies.
Answer:
You were right not to make a shehakol after making ha’adamah.
The berachah over rice, in particular where it have not become extremely soft and stuck together, is possible mezonos, and possibly ha’adamah. Where one makes a ha’adamah on something else, it is possible that the berachah applies to the rice, and therefore it would not be correct to make an additional berachah over the rice.
The best thing to do under the circumstances would be to make a mezonos over a food whose berachah is certainly mezonos. By so doing, one has both the ha’adamah and the mezonos covered, ensuring that the correct berachah has been made.
An additional and important point for the case in point is that if the dish is a single dish, and its main component is vegetables, the berachah on the entire dish will be ha’adamah.
It is wrong to make two berachos over a single dish, and where both components are “important,” the berachah is determined by the majority component.
[The answer above relates to the custom mentioned in the question to make shehakol over rice, as ruled by the Shulchan Aruh Harav for somebody eating rice outside a se’udah; many have the custom of reciting mezonos over rice.]
