The Japanese erect shrines to honor it. The Chinese pay homage just by eating it-up to 8 cups a day. In parts of Asia, the word “to eat” literally means “to eat rice.”
Americans have always been more reserved about rice. It has never achieved the cachet of pasta or the hearty respect we bestow on potatoes. More often than not rice is cast in a supporting role. “Served on a bed of rice,” the menu reads, as if those delicate grains had no other role than to prop up a chicken breast or sop up a sauce.
Even nutritionists have tended to damn rice with faint praise, valuing it more for what it doesn’t have-fat, sodium or excess calories-than for what it does.
All that may be changing. In 1991 we helped ourselves to more than twice as much rice as we did in the ’70s-22 pounds a year, according to the USA Rice Council. We’re scooping it up with chopsticks, simmering it in pilafs and munching it-puffed, popped and pressed-in cereals and snacks. Naturally low in fat and rich in complex carbohydrates, rice is the perfect choice for any healthful diet. And at just a nickel a serving, it’s also a terrific way to slim down a food budget.
But that’s just the beginning. Rice possesses a remarkably rich balance of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fiber. The starch in rice is easier for the body to break down than most carbohydrates, so it’s an ideal source of quick energy.
The rice section of the grocer’s shelf is showing signs of new life. Uncle Ben’s has been joined by a raft of varieties, each with a different texture and flavor: Fragrant basmati rice from India has long, tender grains and a distinctly nutty flavor; Texas grows a similar type. Sweet-scented jasmine rice comes from Thailand, and from Italy we get arborio rice, whose chubby grains are usually simmered to a delectable creaminess in risotto. Even good old white rice comes in short and long grains, plain and parboiled, precooked and microwave-ready.
As for nutrients, the only choice you need to ponder is brown or white. Remember brown rice? Back in the 1960s brown rice was almost as much a part of the counterculture as tie-dye. Brown rice was real rice, we told ourselves, scooping it up at the co-op market and carrying it home in save-a-tree bags. This was rice the way nature intended it-whole, nutritious, unprocessed.
We were right. “When rice is first harvested, the kernels are wrapped in layers of bran and encased in a hard, inedible hull,” says Bill Webb, who leads the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rice Quality Lab. The first step in milling is to remove the hull, revealing the darkish coat of bran that makes brown rice brown. Remove those layers of bran and brown rice becomes white, or “polished” rice.
The original reason for polishing rice was purely pragmatic, Webb says. Over a matter of months, the oil in rice bran goes rancid, spoiling brown rice stored on a pantry shelf. Stripped of bran, white rice can be stored indefinitely.
Eventually many cultures came to prefer the more delicate texture and quicker cooking time of white rice. The trouble is, a lot of what rice has to offer is packed into the bran. When it goes, so do most of the vitamins and minerals, much of the fiber and some of the protein.
To make up for part of this loss, most white rice produced in this country is enriched: doused with B vitamins and iron. Unfortunately, if you’re in the habit of rinsing rice before cooking, those added minerals could go right down the drain-at least if you’ve bought the kind in which the nutrients were dusted on without being sealed into the grain. (You can tell you have the dusted kind if the package reads, “Do not rinse before or drain after cooking.” According to Webb, there’s no need for rinsing anyway: American rice has been thoroughly cleaned before packaging.)
One alternative to plain white rice is parboiled or “converted” rice, which is soaked, steamed and dried before the hull and bran layers are removed, a process that forces some of the original nutrients in the bran to penetrate the kernel, allowing parboiled rice to retain a tad more natural goodness. But just a tad. The real appeal of parboiled rice is its texture; the grains fluff up without getting sticky with starch.
In the nutrition department, at least, brown rice is the clear winner. But even in an age when the words “contains bran” are used to sell everything from snacks to cereal, brown rice accounts for less than 4 percent of all the rice sold in this country.
That’s too bad. A hearty serving of brown rice goes a long way toward supplying the soluble and insoluble fiber we need. Its dense flavor and chewiness can give a boost to everything from soups to stir-fries.
Biologist Robert Nicolosi believes he’s found one more reason to give brown rice a place on your plate.
A few years back, Nicolosi, director of cardiovascular research at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, decided to see how rice bran oil, a staple in many parts of Asia, compared with corn, soybean and other vegetable oils in its effect on cholesterol levels. The results surprised him.
“Rice bran oil has about three times the saturated fatty acids of the other oils we were using,” Nicolosi says. “By all rights, a diet of rice bran oil should have raised cholesterol levels. Instead, it lowered them.”
Is there something in rice bran oil, he wondered, that can cut cholesterol levels despite all that saturated fat? Nicolosi thinks he’s found it. The oil, it turns out, is unusually rich in a substance called oryzanol, a fatty, acid-free lipid that seems to block the formation of low-density lipids, or LDLs-a k a “the bad cholesterol.”
Unfortunately, Nicolosi discovered, the conventional extraction process used to make rice bran oil removes much of the oryzanol in rice bran.
Tinkering with the extraction process, Nicolosi has found a way to retain 40 times more oryzanol. His new oil now looks to be twice as effective as other vegetable oils in lowering cholesterol.
When research subjects at Tufts University Medical Center in Boston consumed 20 percent of their total daily calories as rice bran oil-a little less than 2 tablespoons in all-average LDL levels dipped 20 percent.
Keeping the percentage of dietary fat to a minimum is as important as ever, of course. But using rice bran oil in place of less healthy oils, Nicolosi believes, could do a lot to keep cholesterol levels in check.
One brand of rice bran oil that’s sold in this country, Select origins, is made with the new oryzanol-preserving process. The oil’s relatively bland flavor makes it a good substitute in most recipes.
That’s rice bran oil, of course. No one really knows yet whether a bowl of brown rice can bestow the same benefits. But there’s reason to think it might.
Australian researchers have shown that rice bran was just as effective as oat bran in improving the balance between good and bad cholesterol in men with moderately high cholesterol levels. Nicolosi suspects there’s probably enough oryzanol in brown rice that a daily bowlful could help keep cholesterol levels down.
Whether your choice is white or brown, plain or parboiled, a serving of rice is also a good way to fill up and not out, itself a clear health benefit. And rice contains a potent antidote to diarrhea-the reason so many doctors recommend rice when an intestinal bug hits.
For a perfect pot of rice
What’s good for you, of course, can also be just plain good. Forget the “dread pasty monotony of most rice as it is served in our country,” as writer M.F.K. Fisher once lamented. A few simple tips can help you cook up a perfect pot of rice:
– Choose the right rice. Long-grain rice cooks up dry and fluffy for curries, pilafs and paellas. Short-grain rice is usually more tender and a little stickier, just the thing for rice pudding or Japanese-style meals. If you’re in a hurry, instant rice can be prepared in minutes. There’s even a quick-cooking version of brown rice.
– Hold the cooking temperature down. Rice should simmer, not boil. A roiling boil can turn too much of the water into steam, leaving the rice undercooked and “bony,” as some chefs call it.
– Don’t peek. Lifting the lid interrupts the cooking and can also leave the rice dry but undercooked. When time’s up, let the pot stand, tightly covered, 5 minutes off the heat to let the grains absorb the last bit of moisture.
– And don’t forget rice’s adaptability. It can be spicy as a Cajun gumbo, savory as a Bombay curry, comforting as a bowl of rice pudding, or refreshing as a tall glass of horchata, a Mexican favorite made of sweetened rice milk. A splash of milk and a spoonful of brown sugar can turn a bowl of leftover rice into a snack you don’t have to feel guilty about.
