The two types of bí-hún are not exactly divided along ethnicity lines. Holo people in Taipei and Yilan also traditionally call the thick glassy looking ones that needs to be made on the spot bí-hún.
I think earliest iterations of bí-hún is the thick glassy looking ones. The thin ones that you commonly find here in Taiwan, and the flat ones that you can find in China and Vietnam are created to make it easier for drying, and make it easier to preserve.
I don’t really notice the difference between Taiwanese rice and Thai/Indian/Japanese rice. They all taste the same to me though they look a bit different.
Italian rice does taste different though that’s probably because risotto is a totally different way of cooking rice.
The non-glutinous rice you usually get in Taiwan and Japan is the short grain rice, which needs to be grown in paddies filled with water. Plain cooked short-grain rice will usually clump together because it has more amylopectin.
The non-glutinous rice common Thailand, India, and traditionally in Taiwan and Japanese as well before the 1900s, is the long grain rice, which don’t need to grow in water. Plain cooked non-glutinous long-grain rice do not clump together. Each grain will fall off the spoon on their own. It contains less amylopectin and more amylose.
Fluffy texture is desired for either varieties. However, they don’t really have the same texture or taste. Places that prefers long gain rice usually have cuisines with lots of sauce.
I guess they do taste different but to me the difference is negligible. I barely notice it.
May as well ask here, although there’s probably a thread about it elsewhere: the basmati I make in my Zojirushi rice cooker, on the white rice setting, is usually more clumped / “glutinous” than I’d like. Any suggestions?
These Japanese or Taiwanese rice cookers are calibrated for cooking perfect short-grain rice with 1:1 water to rice ratio. For long-grain rice you need to try 0.8:1 water to rice ratio.
Ask your wife, does all of Taiwan have two crops of rice year. I am curious about this as colder places seem only one a year is possible, and if twice it should be cheaper but is not in Taiwan say vs. Hokaido rice which seems same price with one crop
Thanks! I’ve tried using less water, but probably haven’t gone far enough.
I do about 0.9 even for Taiwanese rice. Otherwise you end up with a big solid mass like polenta.
AFAIK there’s no variety of rice that needs to grow in water. It’s done that way as a matter of tradition (because rice used to be grown on flooded riverbanks) and as a form of weed control.
It also depends on your rice cooker and the type of rice you get.
For a while I was trying rice from different growers, sometimes directly from the farmers, and I would always have to go through a couple of tries to get the best ratio with each new rice.
I don’t usually use the Japanese rice cooker though, so I’m not sure how they are different.
yeah, definitely. It varies a lot.
Mifen at the supermarket is often full of corn flour. Presume it is cheaper. It also makes it easier to work with I think, if you are one of those chaomifen street vendors, you would probably opt for the more plasticy cornflour containing version, because it holds together. 100% rice flour mifen falls apart very easily, so is a little trickier to handle. You can get it one brand of 100% rice flour mifen at PX mart though. It is much dearer than the other brands. Actually it is almost a joke how dear it is given the quantity in the packet, but hey, that is Taiwan.
Maybe they’d grow, but they’d probably taste terrible. Someone can grow rice without a flooded paddy to prove me wrong.
Another thing you can do is, after it finishes cooking, fluff up the rice with one of those rice paddles and then put the cover back on and let it sit a while.
Yea still twice a year with a fallow period where they will sow some turnips in the Winter (fun fact it was the innovation of twice yearly harvests that allowed China’s population to explode supposedly ).
Rice in Taiwan used to be more lucrative but after WHO the price paid to farmers dropped. So you may also see them growing other stable crops such as Taro where water is plentiful.
No idea. Although rice is flood-tolerant, the water still stresses the plant. Possibly that has some positive impact on flavour development, but it’s equally possible that it would taste fine (or better) with ordinary irrigation. I grew a standard hybrid variety as an experiment but never actually got to harvest the rice because the birds ate it all. I assume it tasted OK to them …
It appears that many basmati varieties are grown under ‘upland’ conditions, ie., rain-fed.
Most of Taiwan lacked water for most of the year before modern irrigation networks, yet Taiwan has been growing rice for over 5000 years.
If the Aboriginals used to grow rice without flooded fields, I think the early Han immigrants to Taiwan would adopt the method after realizing that rice can grow perfectly fine without a flooded field. Although the Banaue rice terraces in Ifugao has been growing rice with flooded terraces for at least 2,000 years, so I think ancient people in Taiwan were doing the same as well.
The birds used to eat the peaches in my backyard before they are ripened, and those peaches tastes terrible even when they are ripe.
Well, frankly, farmers are a stubborn lot. You can show them something working twice as well as what they’re doing at the moment, and they’ll still carry on doing what they’re doing because that’s what granddaddy did, and dammit they’re going to keep doing the same. And so will junior when he’s old enough.
Yes, there are some differences between upland rice varieties and flooded-paddy rice, but they’re both flood-tolerant. The main difference is that the upland varieties are drought-tolerant, because upland farmers are often dirt-poor and make no provision for irrigation at all.
The critical point about flooded fields is that that’s what you get when it rains in a monsoon climate - and in the off-season, you don’t get anything at all. You don’t have much choice in the matter. It therefore makes sense to grow rice varieties optimized for flood tolerance. But as with any other crop, as long as you can guarantee the water supply, you’ll get a good result.
Well, rice farmers in California are not bound to such traditions, and water supply condition is dire in California due to climate change. So, if the science can back it up, they should probably adopt growing rice without a flooded field.
We had our own episode of water shortage earlier this year, and irrigation stopped all along the west coast. If it’s possible, it should definitely be something Taiwan should look into. I mean you’d save more water by keeping most of it in the reservoir than leaving them sitting in paddies under the sun.
I just found someone experimenting with that technique. Time to get some samples.