Making White Rice

At our playdate we "made" white rice.  Now, coming from the world of Minute Rice, this was very interesting to me.  But, I also want to say that I don't use Minute Rice in our house...

But anyway, our friend who lives upstairs - Miho is the mom.  Her family grows rice.  This is the bag of rice she has in her home.  It is from her family's rice crop.  As you can see, rice is brown.

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So because white rice tastes better...we put it in this contraption.  I didn't write down the name of it, but basically it grinds the outer layer of the rice off (the brown part) and leaves you with white rice.  Here is a short video of it working:

 And the results:

After you lift the white rice out of the little machine, you see the remnants of the part of the rice that was removed.  It's a brown powder.  You can use it for pickling cucumbers (a Japanese kind), and some women put it in a cotton bag with some soap and use it to wash their face.  They sell this powder in the drug stores here too for this purpose.

And, of course, some people just throw it away.  Not everyone grinds the brown rice into white here - my guess is that many/most just buy white rice.  If you remember one of our first grocery store photos of Sarah standing in front of rice.  There were many, many choices of rice...all white.  And if there was some brown, I missed it among all the other choices of white.

The other thing you need to do when making white rice this way is to rinse the rice until the water runs clear.  This rinses the remnants of the brown powder off of it.  When I bought my first purchase of rice here, the lady I found to help me suggested I may want to buy the kind that is pre-rinsed.  I took her advice, but now I understand what that meant.

The girls really like the white rice we make here out of the rice cooker.  It's stickier, wetter.  When we get home I'm going to replace the rice cooker we have now for one that is a little more like the one we've been using this summer.  Though, we may take a little break from rice, for a bit first...