I am a Chinese person and I have never heard of mixing rice, or even owning more than one kind of rice in your house. It seems so foreign to me. Chinese households will have a big tub filled with rice, and it Is just “rice”. We buy it in 20-pound sacks.
It’s really interesting that the notion of different types of rice is mainly heard of in the cultures where it is not part of every meal. Guess they just imported it from everywhere and then decided to give them names.
There once even was a racist German rice commercial that made fun of “Master Fong” (or some other Chinese name) because he couldn’t eat the non-clumpy German rice with his chopstick. As a kid who loved Chinese food (or what passes as Chinese in Germany) I found that to be preposterous and instructed my mom to never buy that rice.
I always get confused in American supermarkets. Growing up, I only ever knew that the rice to buy was what came in those large sacks with a picture of an elephant on it, and it came from Thailand. It would take me five years to finish a 20-pound bag on my own though.
When I go to a regular American grocery store, I see “long grain rice”, “jasmine rice”, “basmati rice”, and all that, and I have no idea what any of it is.
Long grain is American style rice, like uncle bens for example. It’s creamier than jasmine rice, but not quite as much as arborio rice which is the stuff you need to make (Italian) risotto.
Jasmine rice is an American version of a standard Chinese style rice used for stir fry. It usually works well for most American style Asian dishes.
You’ll also see sticky rice which is Japanese rice used for sushi.
Lastly Basmati rice is Indian rice and is characterized by not being creamy at all. You can pick out individual grains quite easily. To me, Basmati rice on a plate acts like 1000 individual items you have to eat rather than like long grain or arborio rice where a big scoop of it feels like 1 single thing you are taking bites of. It really is necessary for authentic Indian food though.
That’s interesting to me because the French use bread for basically every meal as well and in my mind it serves an equivalent cultural purpose, but they have so much variety it’s mind-boggling. Dark, light, using different grains, flours, shapes, temperatures, yeasts, … Pretty sure wars have been fought over disagreements on flour taste.
That a staple food like that wouldn’t have 1000 traditional variations sounds crazy to me. I think it makes complete sense that Europeans would see rice and think “OK now how many possible combinations are there?” because it’s just how we rationalize cooking.
Might have something to do with rice being a culture-wide staple and historically tended by an impoverished & exploited workforce — whereas breadmaking was more often lauded as an art form. 🤓
Different bread though can be made with the same ingredients in different combinations. So of course they’re was variety. Rice is grown as is. So unless a culture cultivated different species of rice which could take generations then they wouldn’t have multiple types or rice. Different styles of bread could be made with very little extra effort and some probably even happened by accident. It doesn’t take multiple generations to produce a new type of bread.
Funny you say this because I didn’t learn about the distinction between types of rice until I married a desi person. My father-in-law has said before “if I haven’t eaten rice, I haven’t eaten”.
If a white person makes Bengali rice pudding with basmati rice, the ghost of a Bengali will possess their toaster and burn all their bread in retribution.
A Yemeni restaurant in my city always serves a mix of white and red rice. And all their non soup dishes are rice + meat.
In italy rice isn’t part of every meal, but we are the major producer in all Europe. We produce many types of rice by ourselves and they are really different by each other. We didn’t import ‘em and decided to give names…
I didn’t mean that other countries don’t grow their own rice, but that rice arrived over many more ways over the millenia in western countries than in the eastern countries where it had been widespread already, which wouldn’t necessitate much exchange of different varieties.
But by the time the old Greeks and Romans got introduced to rice they very likely already had the pick from many different locations, giving them much more variety to choose from and start growing their own crops.
Reading over Wikipedia Africa and South America started cultivating rice much later than Asia. And if I read it correctly at least in the Americas the native rice was in competition with imported rice from Europe and Asia. So they as well had a wider variety of types to choose from.
But all in all it’s just speculation on my part. No need to feel insulted.
Rice clumps depending on how you rinse and cook it. The type of rice has little to do with it.
The type of rice has a lot to do with it. You can kind of tweak it with rinsing and cooking, but there’s no way you’re getting basmati to stick together like sushi rice.
So my spouse is desi, and in south asia they’ve got loads of different kinds of rice. The most popular, everyday rice, is basmati - once I got a taste of it I was hooked. Other rices are used for specific purposes, like rice pudding, but basmati is the default. In the US (and most of Asia far as I can tell) the default rice is jasmine, the conflict here was between my parents and my wife, combining both rices is a mortal sin.
It was actually a bit surprising when we moved to China that there was only really one kind of rice ever used - buying basmati was just as much a specialty item here as it was in the states.
Jasmine? GTFO. Calrose stand up.
We do have some wild rice and brown rice, but Calrose is the workhorse.
I’m from Jersey. I jasmine. Never heard of Calrose, but I assume it’s a product of California. Will have to keep an eye out.
Imagine someone who’d never seen a meme trying to decipher this
Rice is rice (na naah naah na na)
Ugh, reminds me of the time I grabbed the jasmine rice instead of basmati, what a gloopy mess
Omg I’m so sorry 🫂
Curious, if you have basmati rice available, what are you using the jasmine rice for?
Jasmine is my default rice for anything that doesn’t call for basmati or sushi. Basically, I keep one short, one medium, and one long-grained variety on hand. (I’m not counting the arborio since that has only a single purpose for risotto.)
Oh interesting! We usually substitute basmati for jasmine rice bc we like the flavor better. Unless ofc it’s a dessert of some kind.
I eat rice daily and basically always mix some brown rice into white rice.
Please tell me you cook the brown rice on its own first before adding the white rice in order to compensate for the difference in cooking time 🙏🏾
