Parkinson - Cooking with Rice: More Than 30 Favorite Recipes / Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-126

More than 30 Favorite Recipes

When you learn how complicated it is to grow rice, you may marvel that its the principal food crop of about half the worlds population. In the United States, rice is grown commercially in parts of California, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, and Florida. Rice requires wet soil and a growing season four to six months long with a mean temperature of at least 70F. Although most varieties, known as paddy rice, need to be grown where the crop can be flooded, some, known as upland rice, will grow without flooding if the soil can be kept wet. Deep-water rice, which has culms that float on top of the water, grows in areas where deep, rapid flooding happens naturally. Americans believe that floating rice is harvested by hand from boats, but some photographs from Asia show workers up to their necks in water, harvesting the rice. All this gives you some idea how demanding rice culture can be.

The threshed and winnowed grain, with hulls intact, is known as paddy or rough rice. You cant eat it until you remove some of the tough hulls. Even the writers most lyrical about the joys of growing it yourself admit that hulling rice is pure chore. One old Asian way is to pound the grain with a wooden mallet or work it with a big wooden mortar and pestle.

Several Japanese firms make small hand rice hullers, though they are not generally available in this country. You might improvise your own by putting together a series of hand-cranked rollers which scratch the grain across a rough surface. After using any such method, youd have to clean the grain again to get rid of loose hulls and dirt. Store cleaned rice as you would any other grain.

The Many Forms of Rice

Even if you have to walk five miles on a wooden leg to get to the store, buying rice is easier than growing and cleaning it. Its available in natural food stores and supermarkets at low prices and in considerable variety. Organically grown rice is harder to find. It will be more expensive than that grown with pesticides and chemical fertilizers because organic growers are operating on a smaller scale and havent the benefit of the economies of a big commercial operation. One nutritionist has observed that one thing you can count on is that if rice is cheap, its not organic.

However, if you are willing to forgo the organic label, you will find you can buy a surprising variety of rice. For starters there is polished white rice, which is sold in great quantity and gave plantation workers beriberi back in the late 1800s, until someone thought to replace the B vitamins in their diet that were being polished off the rice. Not long ago, white rice was all you could find on most grocery store shelves. These days, probably because of the growing interest in nutrition, most stores that carry white rice also carry converted rice and brown rice.

Converted rice is a little better for you than white rice because it is partially cooked before milling by a soaking and steaming process, which shoves some of the nutrients from the hulls into the grain so that fewer vitamins and minerals will be lost when the bran is polished away. Converted rice is more expensive than either white rice or regular brown rice, and is about the same price as organic brown rice.

Brown rice is paddy rice that has been hulled and thus lost some, but by no means all, of its bran, germ, and endosperm. Like white rice, it is available in long-grain, medium-grain, and short-grain varieties. To give you an idea of what happens when brown rice is polished to white: about 10 percent of its protein, 85 percent of its fat, and 70 percent of its minerals are removed. Whats left hardly seems worth the water you boil it in. Ironically, you can go to the natural food store and buy rice polishings.

In addition to deciding on white or brown rice, you have to choose among short-, medium-, and long-grain rices. Although you can use these pretty much interchangeably in recipes, you may be surprised at the differences among them in taste and texture. Generally, the short-grain rices tend to be a little more soft and moist and the grains will stick together somewhat. Long-grain rice cooks up into a drier product, with the grains tending to remain separate. The flavor of short-grain rice is somewhat more sweet and pronounced than that of long-grain rice. Medium-grain rice, which you cant always find, tends to have the flavor of short-grain rice and the texture of the long-grain.

The part of the country where you live will determine, to some extent, what rice you can buy. For instance, youre not apt to find Carolina rice in California, or vice versa. If, until now, youve eaten only converted, instant, and white rice, you will be surprised at how much difference in taste and texture you can enjoy as you experiment with the various grain lengths in rice from different parts of the country.

Other rice products you can buy include white and brown rice flour and rice polishings. White rice flour has about the same nutritional value as white rice and it has almost no taste. Brown rice flour is only a little darker than the white, is more nutritious, and has a faint taste. Both flours are usually sold in natural food stores and some specialty and Oriental shops. About the only place you can buy rice polishings, which as weve said are whats milled off the brown rice, is in a natural food store. Rice flour is commonly used by people who are allergic to wheat or have digestive problems. The polishings are used mainly by people looking for natural sources of B vitamins, and add nothing to speak of in the way of good taste or texture.

Of all the whole grains, rice is probably the easiest to introduce to people accustomed to only refined foods. Brown rice has a pleasant but mild flavor and the grain cooks up to be just slightly chewy not tough and not mushy. If youve had trouble cooking rice so that it doesnt turn out gummy, youll be glad to know that brown rice almost never sticks together.

After my family had been eating brown rice for about a year, I became interested in Chinese cooking and in the interests of authenticity, I picked up a box of converted white rice, because Id read that the Chinese prefer white rice. Everyone in the family commented on the fact that the rice that night seemed tasteless. The rest of the box is still on the back of a shelf somewhere. I thought I might use it to make beanbags sometime.