20 replies to this topic

[OnigiriFB]

Hi,

I bought some Japanese brown rice the other days so I can try to eat healthier. I've never had brown rice nor cooked it. I have a rice cooker but didn't know if it uses the same water measurement?

Any recipes that goes well with brown rice?

Thanks

[torakris]

If your rice cooker isn't set up to cook brown rice you might want to try cooking it in a saucepan. My rice cooker has a genmai function and it takes 60 minutes to cook instead of the 38 for my white rice. The water to rice rice is also a little different with genami taking about 1/4 cup more of water. Genmai should also be soaked (at least 1 hour in the summer and 2 hours in the winter) before cooking.

I also have been eating a lot more genmai and have found there are very few foods it doesn't go with. I am having it tonight with chicken teriyaki and nagaimo no tororo and tomorrow with cream stew.

[sanrensho]

Any recipes that goes well with brown rice?

You might want to try a genmai blend (mixed with regular rice) to start. I find the texture preferable to straight brown rice.

Edited by sanrensho, 28 November 2005 - 10:56 PM.

[torakris]

Any recipes that goes well with brown rice?

You might want to try a genmai blend (mixed with regular rice) to start. I find the texture preferable to straight brown rice.

How did you cook this?
I usually eat just one or the other but a while ago I tried to mix them (half and half) and the white rice turned to mush... I cooked it on the genmai setting though.

[OnigiriFB]

If your rice cooker isn't set up to cook brown rice you might want to try cooking it in a saucepan. My rice cooker has a genmai function and it takes 60 minutes to cook instead of the 38 for my white rice. The water to rice rice is also a little different with genami taking about 1/4 cup more of water. Genmai should also be soaked (at least 1 hour in the summer and 2 hours in the winter) before cooking.

I also have been eating a lot more genmai and have found there are very few foods it doesn't go with. I am having it tonight with chicken teriyaki and nagaimo no tororo and tomorrow with cream stew.

Thanks Torakris Umm... this might be a dumb question but why the different soak times? Also what is nagaimo no tororo?

Slightly offtopic - I love Jdrama and watched Hotman and thats where I found out about genmai.

[OnigiriFB]

Any recipes that goes well with brown rice?

You might want to try a genmai blend (mixed with regular rice) to start. I find the texture preferable to straight brown rice.

Thank you. I'll try that. Do you know how to cook it without using the rice cooker?

[torakris]

If your rice cooker isn't set up to cook brown rice you might want to try cooking it in a saucepan. My rice cooker has a genmai function and it takes 60 minutes to cook instead of the 38 for my white rice. The water to rice rice is also a little different with genami taking about 1/4 cup more of water. Genmai should also be soaked (at least 1 hour in the summer and 2 hours in the winter) before cooking.

I also have been eating a lot more genmai and have found there are very few foods it doesn't go with. I am having it tonight with chicken teriyaki and nagaimo no tororo and tomorrow with cream stew.

Thanks Torakris Umm... this might be a dumb question but why the different soak times? Also what is nagaimo no tororo?

The times are different because of the weather, it takes a little longer for rice to absorb the water in cold weather. This might not make a difference outside of Japan though as the houses here with very little insulation and no central heating are freezing in the winter and the kitchens can be very, very cold.

Tororo is grated mountain it looks like this

[sanrensho]

How did you cook this?
I usually eat just one or the other but a while ago I tried to mix them (half and half) and the white rice turned to mush... I cooked it on the genmai setting though.

I'm embarassed to say that I don't exactly know, since my wife usually measures out the rice. Knowing her, I can tell you that it was dumped in at the same time (same pre-soaking time) and cooked on the regular white rice setting. The genmai was probablyl on the low side (a lot less than half).

I'll ask my mom tomorrow, since she uses a genmai blend quite often.

OnigiriFB, I would try using your rice cooker with a low percentage blend (10-15% to start) to start and work your way up. Sorry if this is not too helpful.

Edited by sanrensho, 28 November 2005 - 11:31 PM.

[mizducky]

Do you know how to cook it without using the rice cooker?

Well, here's how I cook brown rice without a rice cooker:

While soaking brown rice is a good idea, I almost never manage to remember.
Mine comes out a little stickier than if I'd have remembered the soaking, but otherwise okay.

I either use a heavy, thick-walled and thick-bottomed saucepan with a tight-fitting lid, or my pressure cooker. In the saucepan, I use a 2:1 water-to-rice ratio. I will also often add a pinch of salt, a strip of kombu, or a thin quarter-sized slice of gingerroot. I put the water on alone to boil first, add the rice (and seasonings) when the water's at a brisk boil, let it come back to a boil and cook for about a scant minute, then turn the heat to low and put the lid on. I then let it simmer along on low for a good 50 minutes, never removing the lid even once lest the steam escape, and then shut the heat off and let the pot sit for another 10 minutes, again without removing the lid. I then fold a clean absorbent dishtowel so that it will cover the pot opening completely with several thicknesses of cloth, quickly whip the lid off, drape the towel over, and put the lid on top, and leave it like that for another 5 to 10 minutes--the towel absorbs a bunch of excess steam/moisture so that the rice will be fluffier. Then I remove lid and towel, fluff the rice gently with a fork, and serve. (Sometimes, even with a heavy pot the rice will scorch with this method, depending on the crankiness of the stovetop burner in question, so I have been known to use one of those heat-diffuser gizmos under the pot to, well, better diffuse the heat.)

In a pressure cooker: I put about two inches of water in the bottom of the cooker, place a rack inside the cooker, and on top of the rack a heat-proof bowl (I found a stainless steel bowl that fits perfectly inside my cooker just for this purpose). In the bowl I put one cup of brown rice plus just 1-1/4 cups of water (plus optional seasonings as above). I then lock on the cooker's lid, put the cooker on high heat till it's up to pressure, adjust the heat to maintain the pressure properly, and cook for about 20-30 minutes. Then I release the pressure, unlock the lid, retrieve my little bowl of rice, fluff with fork and serve. The rice absorbs just enough moisture from the water in the bowl plus the ambient steam from the bottom of the cooker to cook properly--this method tends to produce slightly firmer grains than the saucepan method. This pressure cooker method also has a handy bonus: you can cook dried legumes in the water in the bottom of the cooker at the same time, and voila! you have your beans/rice complete protein combination all out of one pot.

Brown rice does go very well with beans, and not just for the complete-protein angle. I find they come out better if I cook them separately and then combine, rather than trying to cook them from scratch together, which for me usually produces either mushy rice or mushy beans. A can of good-quality Italian plum tomatoes, while not particularly Japanese in style , is a really yummy addition to brown rice and beans--just simmer the cooked rice and beans with the tomatoes for about 20-30 minutes until the rice and beans have absorbed the tomato flavor, and adjust seasonings as desired.

Edited by mizducky, 29 November 2005 - 01:42 AM.

[torakris]

Last night I experimented with a brown and white rice mix. I made 5 cups of (raw) rice, 1 cup of brown to 4 cups of white. I did not soak( I actually forgot about the rice until 5:30 so I didn't have time) and I cooked it on the white rice setting of my rice cooker. I have one of the new fancy IH cookers and I have settings for white rice including katame (on the hard side that takes 38 minutes), futsu (regular that takes 40 minutes) and yawaraka (soft and it takes 46 minutes. I used the yawaraka setting to give the brown rice a bit more time.

It turned out quite nice, the brown rice was a little harder than the white, but it might have been better if I soaked it. Next time I think I might increase the brown rice a bit and it was just barely noticeable. Looked like this

[sanrensho]

Kris, I'm relieved to hear that it turned out alright.

I just got off the phone with my mom. She recommends using haiga-mai (rice with bran), which is technically not genmai. She uses a 2:1 ratio of white rice to haiga-mai cooked with the normal amount of water and on the standard rice setting. A 1:1 ratio is fine as well.

Tamaki Haiga-mai

[BarbaraY]

When I cook brown rice, I like to roast it before cooking. I put it in a saute pan and toss it over a medium flame until it darkens just a little and smells toasty. I cook it in my little Aroama rice cooker with about 1/4 cup more water than plain white rice.
The toasting gives it a nice flavor that I like.
I learned this from a man who was on a macrobiotic diet.

[torakris]

When I cook brown rice, I like to roast it before cooking. I put it in a saute pan and toss it over a medium flame until it darkens just a little and smells toasty. I cook it in my little Aroama rice cooker with about 1/4 cup more water than plain white rice.
The toasting gives it a nice flavor that I like.
I learned this from a man who was on a macrobiotic diet.

I have got to try this!

[torakris]

Kris, I'm relieved to hear that it turned out alright.

I just got off the phone with my mom. She recommends using haiga-mai (rice with bran),  which is technically not genmai. She uses a 2:1 ratio of white rice to haiga-mai cooked with the normal amount of water and on the standard rice setting. A 1:1 ratio is fine as well.

Tamaki Haiga-mai

I am not sure why but I don't care for haiga-mai..
I have bought two different brands and when it was mixed with white it was ok (but nothing worth the price of it), and I didn't care for the flavor of it alone.

[Hassouni]

So twice now I've bought genmai and it had bugs crawling in it upon opening the package! These were well sealed, plastic zip containers, not the paper sacks. Is there any way I can tell if my rice is pest-free?

[Jenni]

Weevils in rice is very common, honestly I would not worry about it too much. Here, it is very common to find weevils in rice, dal and other grains. Even posh high quality products can have them. You can even buy a packet, inspect it and be happy and then a few days or weeks later have the little rascals hatch from the eggs that were hiding amongst the grains!

Let's be practical about this and not toss perfectly good food away. What I do is shove the packet in the freezer for a few hours. This kills the bugs. Then when you wash the grains they dead bodies float to the surface and you can easily tip them away. Sounds gross, but it's just a fact of life.

[earlgrey_44]

So twice now I've bought genmai and it had bugs crawling in it upon opening the package!

This will happen if the retailer and/or wholesaler they use has poor turnover. Find a supplier with a shorter and faster pipe from the farm to you, learn basic best-practice home storage methods, and you will have few infestation problems with whole grains. If and when critters appear, Jenni's comments are apt.

[Hassouni]

So twice now I've bought genmai and it had bugs crawling in it upon opening the package!

This will happen if the retailer and/or wholesaler they use has poor turnover. Find a supplier with a shorter and faster pipe from the farm to you, learn basic best-practice home storage methods, and you will have few infestation problems with whole grains. If and when critters appear, Jenni's comments are apt.

I buy from Super H Mart, they have hundreds if not thousands of people coming in on a daily basis, so not sure that's a problem.

[Jenni]

So twice now I've bought genmai and it had bugs crawling in it upon opening the package!

This will happen if the retailer and/or wholesaler they use has poor turnover. Find a supplier with a shorter and faster pipe from the farm to you, learn basic best-practice home storage methods, and you will have few infestation problems with whole grains. If and when critters appear, Jenni's comments are apt.

I am not sure it has much to do with turnover, because trust me turnover of rice and dal is not a problem here!

Sent from my HTC Wildfire S A510e using Tapatalk

[earlgrey_44]

Wellll, I'm not so sure.
Lots of people may shop at Super Store X, but do you really know how often the company buyers buy their brown rice? How long it sits in their distribution centers or in the store?

Back in the day, we had a wholesale distributorship that sent whole grains, freshly ground flours, various pulses over a large swath of midwest america. The brown rice farms we bought from were located in California and Arkansas. I forget how frequent the farm to warehouse deliveries were, but it certainly wasn't a once-a-year situation. The amount of cleaning these grains had before they were packaged (generally in large paper bags) at the farms and sent to us varied. We had lots of control over our trucking and deliveries,and in both the wholesale warehouse and in my retail store, things turned over much faster than the typical natural foods warehouses and stores at the time. I know this, since I sought out lots of comparative data.

While we had to do the prudent inventory checks and IPM controls in the store, we rarely threw out infested product that became that way in the store. I doubt if there was ever an instance of receiving infested rice from the wholesale. It's possible I may have encountered rice that became infested in the store, but vary very few instances if any. Plus, I saw few instances of infested anything in my kitchen, at the tail end of the chain. I knew that other retailers had regular problems with infested deliveries from their wholesales, as well as a worse situation than I with in-store problems, and these people invariably bought from distributors with fewer turns and longer storage cycles than ours.

So yes, infestation happens, and is inevitable to some degree with whole foods. I hereby forthrightly declare, however, that sealed, infested packages on the store shelf may rightly be called "old", and should not be considered a "normal" expectation in this part of the world by any stretch, especially if it happens more than once. That said, if you find yourself with a small quantity of infested brown rice at home, you need not necessarily toss it, and the world will probably not come to an end, as pointed out above.

[Hassouni]

well I got a new, different bag, shook it around a bunch in the store to see if anything was visible through the window of the bag. All clear, so took it home and froze it last night. Here's keeping fingers crossed....