Read a few pages on rice and grains (pages 128-139).
- Rice is a seed, but made edible by removing the husk.
- Removing husk gives you brown rice, but because of the short shelf life, it’s often milled and turned into white rice.
- Two types of starches: amylopectin and amylose. Amylopectin starch is loose and amylose is hard. Therefore, sticky rice is high in amylopectin and fluffy rice is high in amylose. In order of amylopectin (most to least): sticky rice, risotto rice, paella rice, white rice, wild rice.
- Food safety: do not reheat rice after a day (page 132)
- Whole grains contain the bran (skin?) of the grain. Processed grains remove this.
- Quinoa
- High in protein, full of nutrients
- Not the seed of a grass plant like rice and other grains, called a pseudograin - related to beets and spinach.
- The germ is the part inside that contains many of the nutrients. In other grains the germ is a small pocket inside, but in quinoa it’s on the inner edge (moves to the outside when cooked unlike other grains).