Rice: Red and brown

Rice news continued.

Red rice: I've enjoyed this exotic premium rice from Bhutan for years without realizing that in much of the rest of the world, the U.S. included, it's a troublesome weed. According to a recent report from the USDA National Rice Research Center at Stuttgart, Arkansas, some red rices are strains of the same Oryza sativa that gives us ordinary brown and white rices, while others are sister species. They're undesirable in ordinary rice fields because they "shatter," or drop their grains when they're mature, instead of retaining them so that they can be harvested; and their red outer bran layer adheres more tightly to the grains, which are often broken in the milling process.

But red rice has long been cultivated as a staple crop and cooked with its bran intact in Bhutan, parts of China and India, and elsewhere in Asia. Recently it has become popular in Japan for its high content of antioxidant phenolic compounds. The red pigments in the bran are water-soluble anthocyanins that are bonded to some of the rice bran proteins. The qualities of the weedy U.S. strains vary, but most red rices had higher protein contents than ordinary rices. Maybe the weed is on its way to the mainstream.

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Patindol, J. et al. Comparison of physicochemical properties and starch structure of red rice and cultivated rice. J. Agric. Food Chem. 2006, 54, 2712-18.