This was going to be a "WTF is with all the parboiled brown rice ?" thread, which is heavily off topic but since every OT question seems to uncover a new cache of knowledge among the forum members I figured "what the heck ?".

I recently discovered that I actually preferred brown rice to white rice, so had been buying that pretty regularly. Last grocery trip I picked up the wrong bag by mistake (a 5 pound bag of parboiled mixed in with the identically-packaged brown) so still needed to buy brown rice on my next grocery run. This time every brand/size of brown rice on offer seemed to be parboiled, which didn't make a lot of sense, but I didn't have all day so picked up another bag and headed home.

When I got around to cooking some rice, I found that the supposedly brown rice cooked up white. That got me looking into parboiled brown rice a bit deeper, since I thought the whole idea of brown rice was *not* milling off the outer layers and I didn't see how the result could be white. There was surprisingly little information on the internet about parboiled brown rice, just a couple of studies indicating that nutritionally it was "not much worse than regular brown rice", midway between regular brown rice and parboiled white rice.

That still didn't explain why the rice cooked up white, or why parboiled brown rice had suddenly taken over the store shelves.

Last night I was in a different grocery store, and the rice mystery was still bugging me, so I stopped by the rice section and looked at the offerings some more. Revelation.

The brown rice I had purchased earlier (which was from Mr. Goudas but which said "BROWN RICE" in big letters on the front, was actually BROWN *brand* RICE if you looked at the fine print. Guess they made up the "BROWN brand" to reflect the higher nutritional content of parboiled rice, and to fool people like me.

So... nothing has changed. There are still the two brands of parboiled brown (Uncle Bens & Dainty), promoted for their shorter cooking time, one lonely bag of regular brown rice, a million varieties of white rice, and a lot of bags labeled BROWN RICE which are actually parboiled white rice. Buyer beware.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with ten pounds of parboiled white rice. I'm thinking that's gonna make one BIG pot of jambalya...

Last edited by bridgman; 12/24/09 04:27 PM.

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