A random thread for food things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Cudzoziemiec]

MiL had some transplanted from the forest. They were small, dark and delicious. I remember that from the time we first showed them to our son, when he was about 15 months maybe, he continually wanted to visit that part of the garden. Didn't stop until there was snow on the ground.

[Wowbagger]

The ones I liked best had ripened in the shade; they were juicier.

When I was a kid we had a dog that would pull off the raspberry flesh and leave the hull hanging on the cane.  I got the blame, and scolded for lying about it into the bargain, until one of my parents saw it happen.  Apologies? Forget it.

Every dog we've had has done that with blackberries, but never raspberries.

[ian]

We found a couple of cherry trees at the weekend. We must have ate a metric tonne. A complete antidote to the anodyne cherries we've been buying.

[Cudzoziemiec]

In the Old Life, I always used to buy the cheapest rice, 45p a kg at Sainsbury's. As that's now unavailable or at least hard to get, I've been buying whatever I can find in the Co-op etc. Usually it's Tilda long grain at £2/kg, so hugely more expensive. But I'm really impressed by the difference in quality. It cooks quicker, with less water and doesn't make a glutinous lump.* It's not really five times as good but I reckon I'll go down to the Korean shop down the road one day and get a big bag of something similar.

*Does this mean it contains less protein? I assumed it was starch that made it sticky but glutinous is so similar to gluten.

[hellymedic]

I think it is starch that makes rice sticky and makes wallpaper paste adhere.

Use Mr Sainsbury's website to compare nutrient content but make sure you don't compare nutrients in cooked rice with uncooked because different products are described differently.

[Kim]

As someone who eats a fair bit of rice, and isn't completely skint, I avoid the cheap stuff (except in emergencies) for exactly this reason.  Buying massive bags brings the cost down.

My staple is a decent basmati, but I keep some Uncle Ben's around for variation and taking camping^[1].


_{[1] It's *extremely* forgiving about how you cook it, and very low in excess starch, which makes it ideal for bunging on a Trangia and simmering until you remember you put the rice on and extract yourself from your shelter from the sudden downpour / thrilling conversation about bottom brackets / game of Nyeball.}

[ian]

There are lots of varieties of rice, all with different qualities. Cheaper rice is stodgy and tends to be eaten locally, the more proteinaceous stuff is worth more so gets sold (in part, this dynamic results in malnutrition in very poor areas). That's mostly what we see at a premium in the supermarkets of countries where rice isn't a common crop.

Soaking and rinsing the cooked rice will get rid of some starch, but the really starchy stuff just turns into the sort of indeterminate stodge that appears on the plate in much of the developing world.

I always swear by aged basmati – which I didn't even know was a thing until a year back. I may have created it inadvertently in the past by simply forgetting a half-consumed bag at the back of the cupboard, of course.

[Ham]

I'd also point folk to Baldo Pirinic from a Turkish shop, especially when making a pilaf.

[Cudzoziemiec]

There are lots of varieties of rice, all with different qualities.

To the extent that in India the only word they have for rice seems to be 'rice'. In local languages they have a dozen or more seemingly unrelated words to describe different types of 'rice'.

Edit cos it doesn't seem clear: I mean the only generic word in use seems to be the English 'rice'. There are a whole host of words in a whole host of local languages referring to specific varieties. There doubtless are some referring to rice in general, but why use that when you can be specific? A bit like the 57 varieties of Inuit snow.

[ian]

There are lots of varieties of rice, all with different qualities.

To the extent that in India the only word they have for rice seems to be 'rice'. In local languages they have a dozen or more seemingly unrelated words to describe different types of 'rice'.

There's a non-exhaustive list of cultivars currently being grown on Wikipedia. There's a lot of them. Long grain are a subspecies known as Indica, which tend to be less stodgy compared to Japonica, which are the stickier glutinous varieties. Glutinous in reference to rice (anything really) confusingly has nothing to do with gluten.

The qualities are also affected by the milling (brown is de-husked, white is de-husked, de-hulled, and the kernel polished, and easy cook has basically been pressure steamed).

[citoyen]

While we're on the subject, the stuff labelled "pudding rice" in UK supermarkets is no good for making risotto. Trust me on this.

(Risotto rice, however, does make a good rice pudding. If you like rice pudding. Which I don't.)

[Tim Hall]

We found a couple of cherry trees at the weekend. We must have ate a metric tonne. A complete antidote to the anodyne cherries we've been buying.

There's a guerilla* cherry tree on my way to work, dropping its fruit right now.  Trouble is, it's right on the edge of a dual carrioageway, which is getting busier and busierr each day.  I may pay a nocturnal harvesting visit.

* one of those tyree that isn't where it should be.  Either escaped, triffid-like, from a domestic garden or, maybe, the offspring of a cherry stone gobbed out of the window of a passing motor.

[ian]

There's a world's best rice contest. I've no idea if it's like Eurovision, with Myanmar giving the Thai's effort nil points. Anyway, the Vietnamese have been cleaning-up, 2019's winner was the less than excitingly named ST25, following up their previous year's win with ST24. I have high hopes for Vietnam's ST26 in 2020.

[orienteer]

Been shopping to stock up with various Japanese ingredients today, including a 10kg sack of rice, the glutinous kind suitable for Japanese cuisine, easy to pick up with chopsticks.

Dinner this evening is mainly sashimi - yellow tail and bluefin tuna, and octopus.

[Cudzoziemiec]

While we're on the subject, the stuff labelled "pudding rice" in UK supermarkets is no good for making risotto. Trust me on this.

(Risotto rice, however, does make a good rice pudding. If you like rice pudding. Which I don't.)

Yebbut this isn't the audax food thread! 

[Cudzoziemiec]

Kim mentioned Uncle Ben's rice upthread. Apart from being a possibly racist brand name, what is it? I didn't realise it was a distinct thing as opposed to, well, a possibly racist brand name.

[ian]

Rice has about twice the number of genes than a human has (possibly three, but only 12 chromosomes). It was the first cereal genome sequenced – an exemplar of international science effort (but also some frantic diplomacy), with different countries agreeing to take on different chromosomes (the UK opted for a number 2). The entire genome shotgun sequences came from everyone's favourite dastardly agro-villains Monsanto and Syngenta (boo! hiss!). It also featured the first fully sequenced centromere*. It was one of the last organisms to be entirely sequenced via cloned artificial chromosomes and Sanger-style brute force, the accumulating technological benefits of the HGP coming to fore thereafter and making everyone involved think if only I'd waited a few years.

*generally, even though we declare a genome fully sequenced, bits get skipped, especially repetative stretches of DNA and other structural elements.

[rafletcher]

Kim mentioned Uncle Ben's rice upthread. Apart from being a possibly racist brand name, what is it? I didn't realise it was a distinct thing as opposed to, well, a possibly racist brand name.

I think it’s a polished par-boiled variety.

[Kim]

Kim mentioned Uncle Ben's rice upthread. Apart from being a possibly racist brand name, what is it? I didn't realise it was a distinct thing as opposed to, well, a possibly racist brand name.

Parboiled long-grain.  The company may have invented the process?

[ian]

Easy-cook then, though that's a misnomer, what it means is they process the rice by soaking and heating or steaming under pressure so the grains make for fluffy, non-glutinous rice. It doesn't actually mean it's any easier to cook (though you shouldn't need to rinse it, etc. though that's not really what I'd call a chore). See Huzenlaub Process. Uncle Ben is the brand of a big Texan rice converter (it used to be called 'converted rice').

I feel at this point, I should put rice in its place. It may have 2.5x as many genes as the humble human, mighty wheat knocks it into a bucket with a mighty 108,000 genes, so about double that. But it cheats by being hexaploid (humans are diploid, so we have two sets of chromosomes – other than our gametes which are haploid and have one – whereas wheat has six sets) so is, in fact, a menage à trois of different plants. It's so large that the fully annotated reference genome took till last year to be published. I, for one, look forward to the final completion of the triffid genome project.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I can see how that might be appealing when camping. Uncle Ben's rice that is, not triffids.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I feel at this point, I should put rice in its place. It may have 2.5x as many genes as the humble human, mighty wheat knocks it into a bucket with a mighty 108,000 genes, so about double that. But it cheats by being hexaploid (humans are diploid, so we have two sets of chromosomes – other than our gametes which are haploid and have one – whereas wheat has six sets) so is, in fact, a menage à trois of different plants. It's so large that the fully annotated reference genome took till last year to be published. I, for one, look forward to the final completion of the triffid genome project.

This got me wondering about triticale. According to Wikipedia it's "amphidiploid".

The triticale hybrids are all amphidiploid, which means the plant is diploid for two genomes derived from different species. In other words, triticale is an allotetraploid. In earlier years, most work was done on octoploid triticale. Different ploidy levels have been created and evaluated over time. The tetraploids showed little promise, but hexaploid triticale was successful enough to find commercial application.[3]

If I claimed to really understand that, you wouldn't believe me.

[Sergeant Pluck]

Parboiled rice (like Uncle Ben’s) has more nutrients than non-parboiled white rice.

[ian]

Triticale has two diploid genomes derived from wheat and rye. Alas, this cross is sterile because it had odd numbers of chromosomes and consequent meiotic instability (it's basically a barn dance with unequal numbers of male and female participants, someone gets left out, there's a scene and everyone goes home to pout). But there's a way around this by bumping up the ploidy level (basically doubling up the chromosomes) – colchicine, which interferes with meiosis does just this. There are other ways. Yeah, and people worry that adding a single gene creates monstrous GMOs.

Amphidiploid and allotetraploid mean the same thing, basically two diploid genomes from different sources. Maize is also an allotetraploid.

Bits of humans are polyploids (liver parenchyma, heart muscle, bone marrow, placental tissues). Complete polyploidy in humans usually results in early miscarriage of the embryo or a failure to implant. It's not common in animals, other than fish and amphibians. Some amphibians have a huge genetic bunfight called kleptogenesis. Plants can have all kinds of ploidy levels which leads to very complex genomes and very sophisticated methods of gene regulation.

[Wowbagger]

Kim mentioned Uncle Ben's rice upthread. Apart from being a possibly racist brand name, what is it? I didn't realise it was a distinct thing as opposed to, well, a possibly racist brand name.

We have a few packs of this as a result of the Government's largesse at the start of the COVID pandemic. I have yet to cook any - I have only ever cooked rice from scratch and have never dealt with packet rice.