Scientists Discover Simple Way To Cook Rice to Reduce Calories

[hippywife]

and glycemic impact as well, it seems.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/25/scientists-have-figured-out-a-simple-way-to-cook-rice-that-dramatically-cuts-the-calories/?tid=pm_pop

[elleng]

1. Hi, wife!

How are you doing? Long time no see!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. My dear hippywife!

You're back! Oh, I cannot tell you how overjoyed I am to see you, dear girl!



Thanks for the article too!

[hippywife]

3. Hi, ladies!

I was just getting ready to call it a night and head off to read, when I came across this article and decided to post it.

I snuck in yesterday on a couple of other posts.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. I did a search and there you were!

Gawd, it's great to have you back!

[hippywife]

9. Thank you, Peggy.

I really did miss everyone here and the kitchen camaraderie. It struck me the other day even more when I came to search for the Fanny Farmer Fresh Banana Cake recipe I shared many years ago. (It had been lost on my own computer when I had a hard drive crash and someone forgot there was a partition on it with all my recipes so didn't recover that part. Sadly, I hadn't backed them up, either. But that part has at least been rectified.)

[SheilaT]

5. Cook the rice and then refrigerate for 12 hours?

Like that's a practical approach. Maybe if lots of rice is consumed at every single meal it would make sense, but I rarely plan that far ahead on any of my meals.

One of the things I like about rice is that it only takes 20 minutes to cook. And no, I don't use a rice cooker and I'm always flabbergasted when someone says they can't cook rice properly. The secret is DON'T LIFT THE TOP OFF WHILE IT'S COOKING. Not hard at all.

[JayhawkSD]

6. Indeed.

I also use 1-3/4 cups of water per cup of rice rather than the traditional 2 cups, with a little bit of salt in the water. Don't know how important the salt is (I use only about 1/4 tsp), but it's a family tradition of at least three generations and I've never had the courage to cook rice without it.

[SheilaT]

16. I live at 7,000 feet, so in my case in increase the water slightly.

Rice needs salt. The benefits of extremely low salt diets are overrated. We need salt.

[JayhawkSD]

17. AHA !! I think you have it Watson.

I knew that salt raises the boiling point of water, but I never connected that to cooking rice. I'm cooking with less water and at a higher temperature, which may have to do with why I get lighter, fluffier rice. My great grandmother was pretty smart.

And yes to your other point as well. My wife freaks out at how much salt I use at the dinner table. I grew up in a desert, and crave salt. She came with me to my cardiologist (two heart attacks) and asked him if I should cut down on salt. He said my heart attacks were unrelated to clogged arteries, that my arteries are nice and clear and my blood pressure is fine, and that he saw no reason for me to cut back on salt. I thought my wife was going to slug him.

[SheilaT]

19. While I'd certainly hate to see your wife and cardiologist get into fisticuffs

too many people have bought into the notion that all salt is bad, and that somehow a totally salt-free diet would be perfect. One of the things salt is needed for is to maintain blood volume. Pregnant women, especially, need enough salt for the needed increase of blood volume while they are pregnant.

I've also read that it is simply impossible to overdose on salt. It's one of the things your body flushes out.

[hippywife]

8. Rice is easy to cook, even on the stovetop...

but it can also be cooked in advance, and then once cooled frozen in individual servings. Think of all the Chinese American entrees in the freezer section of the grocery. The rice isn't cooked in the microwave, merely reheated with the rest of the ingredients.

So planning that far ahead only need entail cooking it while you cook another meal, better yet on a weekend, letting it cool thoroughly then portioning and freezing. A time saver later, even above the 20 minutes it takes to prepare it uncooked, no?

[SheilaT]

15. I actually do a lot of cooking and freezing since I live alone.

It's more a case of the fact that lots of recipes make much larger portions than I can possibly consume before it will go bad. Right now my freezer has lots of individual portions of stuff I've made. And while that's a very efficient and economical thing to do, nothing is quite as good as the just cooked whatever. But if I decide today I want to make something like curried chicken, or chicken of muchness, each of which needs rice, I'm not going to make the rice a day ahead. Probably because I rarely know a day ahead what I'm going to be fixing.

And it's not as though rice needs to be watched closely. In fact, it's those who watch it closely that have the most trouble with it.

[hippywife]

18. My apologies if I'm misunderstanding you in any way...

but aside from the preference of preferring or wanting to have it freshly cooked, I don't see the difference between freezing individual portions of other meal components and freezing the cooked rice the same way. Just me, I suppose, since while entirely doable for meal planning purposes alone, if this does really work, for diabetics such as myself or those struggling with obesity issues, it makes it even more eminently worth the little bit of effort required to do so, even though I only cook for two. But to each their own according to their own needs.

[SheilaT]

20. I need to apologize if I came off snippy, which I did not intend.

While I certainly see the value of doing a whole lot of cooking and freezing once a week or once a month, I'm much more of a person who cooks what she feels like when she feels like. And then I do try to freeze the excess so that somewhere down the road I don't need to cook, and I can just heat up something. And rice is one of the things I've frozen as individual servings, because, among other things, it thaws faster than anything else I freeze.

[hippywife]

21. Didn't take your comments as snippy at all, SheilaT.

Just trying to better understand. Thanks for participating in the discussion.

[hollysmom]

7. I eat brown rice, is that as bad?

[hippywife]

10. Morning, Holly.

According to the article, and as has been noted for some time, the brown rice and any grain as close to whole as possible, is better as they are not as quickly and easily digested giving them less of a glycemic impact.

Google "resistant starches".

[hollysmom]

22. thanks,

Some times I think I am reading impaired, I thought I read the whole article but must have been distracted.

[hippywife]

23. That was my wording

not theirs. It's a long article so I was just paraphrasing.

[Phentex]

11. It's so good to see you!

You have been missed! Hope all is well with you!

[hippywife]

12. Morning, Phentex!

And thank you! Very good to see you, too. While I can't profess to all being "well" exactly, we are managing.

Hope all is indeed well with you.

[japple]

13. I think it is the combination of the coconut oil with the rice

THEN cooling it for 12 hours that does the trick. When I lived alone, I always froze leftover rice and it thaws/reheats just fine. I'm going to try this. Thanks, HW for the article.

[hippywife]

14. I agree, and...

they didn't say it had to be cooled in the fridge that long, just that they did. I'm going to bet that so long as it's cooled thoroughly it would be fine, even if it doesn't take all of 12 hours.

[hippywife]

24. By way of an update on this:

I often read the Wednesday Free Range on Food chat in the WaPo, where sometimes questions regarding previously published articles are answered.

One question was regarding the use of the coconut oil, asking if a different one can be substituted. The answer from the author of the original article:

The researchers believe that sunflower oil in particular is a good substitute, but they only experimented with coconut oil. Olive oil, however, because of how it’s architecture changes when heated, isn’t ideal. I don’t know about canola oil, but I assume it’s similar.

In response to another question that was somewhat similar:

...they did find that reheating the rice after cooling it in the refrigerator (even by microwave) didn’t alter the results. So you can eat the rice hot! Which, I think, is pretty important to understand.