Last evening, as I was making rice to go with dinner, I remembered I had seen something online about washing rice before you cook it. So, while I was waiting for my unwashed rice to cook, I decided to look into the idea of washing your rice before you cook it.
I will admit, I have never washed my rice before cooking. It was surprising the number of articles and recipes that assume that’s what everyone does. You either wash the rice in a bowl of water and few times, or rinse it in a strainer under running water until the water going through runs clear. Most people say it rinses off excess starch and makes the rice less sticky and gummy.
This is not realty something I find to be an issue, so I usually skip that step. Although it did seem to pop up a lot in recipes. Although the idea of washing away starch doesn’t seem to be really true.
These days, most of our rice comes to us pretty clean to begin with. In the past, rice may have contained starch dust and even the occasional husk from the processing, but that doesn’t seem to be much of an issue these days. So is there a good reason for washing the rice?
According to one article, it can also wash away trace amounts of arsenic that could be on or in the rice. It’s just something the plants tend to soak up while growing, so it does accumulate a bit. Not enough to have much effect on us, but it’s there. So maybe you want to wash that off.
But there’s a down side. Washing rice before cooking can also wash away vitamins and minerals in the rice that we want in there. So you get rid of the bad stuff, but also get rid of some of the good stuff at the same time.
After wading through a couple articles, it seems washing rice before you cook it isn’t really a big deal. It’s more a matter of what you are used to doing, as near as I can figure.
By the time I waded through all that, my unwashed rice was done and it was time to eat. I may not have come up with a good reason to wash my rice, but I did kill time while it was cooking.