He: Rice

Sorry...no pretty pictures this time. This is just an information post to help clear some nutritional information out of my head. This is just about rice, spurred on by an article that I read earlier today in cook's illustrated that was talking about the best ways to cook brown rice.

Just so that I don't run into any potential issues with Cooks Illustrated getting pissed off that I put up their cooking method on the internet, I won't. The way that I normally cook brown rice is basically the same way that I cook white rice. I usually do a ratio of 1.5:1 of water to rice and steam it until tender (at least 45 minutes). you can get more complicated than that, but for basic rice that works. When you have significantly more rice you need to add more time, but for simplicity's sake I'm just putting up this. Now, you don't have to be limited to just water for cooking your rice....you can use just about any liquid under the sun. I have found over the years that you need to be careful not to use any sort of high acid liquids (tomato juice, wine, orange juice, Dr. pepper) to cook your rice because it has a tendency to cause the grains to split down their length. Also, I personally prefer to add salt before cooking, while Brandy prefers to season her rice after cooking (my method is see as the more western technique, her's is the more eastern).

The next big topic that I want to share is nutritional information when dealing with rice. For many years now in assorted cooking circles I've had people blast at me for not having issues with parboiled rice (Uncle Ben's rice). They say that it's basically a white rice, and when white rice is made it's pearled, or tumbled to remove the outer bran and with it goes most of the nutrients. While the glycemic freaks are right that plain white rice isn't all that good for you and will cause a glycemic spike in your system that will cause you to store most of the calories in the rice as fat, Uncle Ben's/parboiled rice isn't quite the same thing. The way that parboiled rice is made is that it's flash steamed while it's still a whole grain (brown rice basically). What happens is that a lot of the nutrients that are in the bran layer actually adhere to the inner white part of the grain, and when this rice is tumbled it doesn't lose all of the nutrients that unsteamed white rice does. True, you will still have a glycemic spike by eating parboiled rice, but at least you will get more nutrients into your system while this happens.

The last thing that you should think about when you are out shopping for rice is, where is your rice coming from? You can get just your basic old Uncle Ben's rice, or Minute rice (if you really want to support Kraft foods and mega-agribusiness) or you can purchase rice from a legitimate American company that grows fantastic rice. The company that I'm imploring you to try is Lundberg Family Farms . All of their rice is grown right here in California...actually I've met some of the people in the company and cooked for all of the growers and they're just fantastic people. They actually produce rices that the world market sees as being the best in the world. If you try nothing else you have to try their short grain brown rice just once. I also wholeheartedly recommend their wild rice blend...it's just some really tasty stuff

If you need recipes for what to do with rice let me know and I'll put some up here.