Rice Deserves Better Than a Kochbeutel

Table of Contents Table of Contents “Rice” Is Not a Useful Specification Grain length and starch Milling and processing A Small Field Guide to the Rice Shelf The Method Is Part of the Dish My Rice-Cooker Baseline Washing Is a Dial, Not a Religion Buy Better Rice, Then Get Out of Its Way Sources and Further Reading I need to talk about rice. This is admittedly unusual territory for a blog that spends most of its time on FreeBSD, routing, self-hosting, and the occasional recipe disguised as a shell script. But rice has been mistreated in Western European kitchens for long enough, and somebody has to open the incident report. In Germany, rice is often treated as anonymous white ballast: boil a plastic Kochbeutel in a large pot of water, cut it open, put the pale contents next to the actual food, and deploy enough sauce to make nobody notice. Ugh. The result is technically edible in the same sense that a server answering ICMP is technically in production. It has passed the lowest possible…