… is not always white! Rice may be green, red, brown, purple or black.
Rice has been domesticated in Asia more than 8000 years ago and
its importance as a staple food is even deep-seated in Chinese everyday-language,
where the word for “cooked rice” (饭/fàn) is part of all meals:
breakfast (早饭/zǎofàn) , lunch (午饭/wǔfàn) and dinner (晚饭/wǎnfàn).
Rice is usually cultivated on flooded fields, which makes rice
production more efficient because it controls weed growth and pests. Although
rice can also be grown without flooding the fields, the cultivation of 1 kg
rice therefore normally requires ~1400 liters of water on average or even more
(such as ~2500-5000 liters per kg rice).
Green rice, as it is popular in Vietnam, stems from sticky rice that is
still immature. The harvesting and preparation process of green sticky rice (Cốm) is
done in autumn and it is a laborious and sophisticated process. It is harvested
by hand at a delicately chosen time point to catch exactly the right degree of
maturity. Furthermore, it is said to be best only within the first 24 hours
after harvesting. Green rice, which has a slightly sweet taste, is then either eaten
plain or it is used to prepare desserts (e.g. cakes, sweet soup) or as an
ingredient in other dishes.
Red, black/purple and brown rice are all whole grain rice sorts, which have
differently colored husks. When cooked, the black color of black rice turns into
a dark purple.
Although fibers are generally healthy, the fibers in whole grain rice
bear a potential health risk because rice can accumulate arsenic more readily
than other plants from its environment and it is even more enriched in the
husks. Therefore white rice may have reduced arsenic levels compared to whole
grain rice. Besides testing rice for arsenic to allow selection of rice with
low arsenic levels for consumption, the risks from arsenic in rice can be
lowered by soaking rice in lots of water that is poured away after soaking or
by cooking rice in a large amount of water.
Because black rice was reserved for royals in Ancient China, it is also
called “forbidden rice” or “emperor’s rice”. It is more nutritious than many other
sorts of rice and therefore was supposed to prolong the emperor’s life.
Rice with a red color can either be rice with a reddish husk or it may
be rice that has been cultivated with a particular mold that causes the red
color of “red yeast rice”, a type of fermented rice that is used as a food
colorant and which also is used in Traditional Chinese medicine.
米饭 / mǐfàn / rice
Sources and further reading:
Black
Rice Research, History and Development, Kushwaha Ujjawal, Springer
International Publishing,2016, eBook ISBN 978-3-319-30153-2, ISBN
978-3-319-30153-2
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