In Japan, there are 150 types of rice to choose from – aged basmati is a good start
RICE SEEMS A pretty basic ingredient. To some cultures it’s crucial: south India, Thailand, most of South East Asia and beyond. But it’s a bowl of starch, right? Wrong, I’m afraid, although I hadn’t really considered the question until I read recently about Kokoromai, a restaurant in Tokyo, and ate some old rice.First, the old rice – aged basmati to be precise. If you keep rice in the correct conditions, the starch content changes and the flavours are concentrated. My dish was a three-and-half-year-old, AAA-grade basmati from the Taraori region of Haryana in India, and it was like no rice I had tasted before. There was an intense, sweet herbal quality to it, with a purity of flavour. It is little wonder that this is considered one of the most pure of Ayurvedic foods, sattvic to be precise: cleansing. It is the starches in rice that determine its stickiness. The more amylopectin you have (the other starch is amylose) the stickier your rice. Cook rice and you gelatinise the starches which the body then turns to sugar. If you age rice, it gets harder as the amylopectin is concentrated. The flavour also decreases. Except with true basmati, which does the opposite; the flavour is enhanced (actually concentrated).Nobody seems to know why this is the case. Tests on just two basmati rices showed enhanced attributes. Perhaps because basmati has the highest levels of amino acids and other nutrients such as iron, niacin, phosphorus, potassium, riboflavin and thiamine. It also has up to 12 times as much 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline as other rices (that’s aroma to us non-chemists).
Kokoromai is run by Tetsuhiro Yamaguchi, who says we’re eating too much pasta and bread. Kokoromai offers 12 different rices, each identified by region, producer and variety. It’s a menu in its own right, something to celebrate and to partner with other dishes. Rice matching might seem extreme, but in Japan there are 150 commercial varieties to choose from and Yamaguchi samples them all each year to work out which ones are going to appear on his menu.The rices are bought unpolished, a task performed by his chefs the day before they are required. The rice is then boiled, after an overnight soaking, but only when it is ordered. Short-order cooking in the extreme.Compare this to popping out for a bag of rice, which is all most of us ever do. And perhaps rather too many of us are inclined towards an over processed, easy-to-cook variety.
Recently, I had a vegetarian Thali that arrived on a big tray with little pots of deliciousness for me to dig into, sporting a large mound of rice in the middle. The taste of the rice was truly amazing, a supercharged flavour, elegant, jewel-like. It was good enough to eat on its own, and it turned out to be aged basmati. In Hindi, bas means aroma, mati is mother, so it is literally “the mother of all aromas”.Old and new varieties, different strains, varied characteristics? Rice may at first appear to be a simple starch but is clearly rather more than that. Accessing the 150 varieties of Japanese rice might involve a long-haul flight but you can get aged basmati here in Ireland. Click on to greensaffron.com the spice company based in east Cork, for a list of good suppliers. Or buy basmati from your favourite Asian grocer.
harnold@irishtimes.com
