Dr Michelle Dickinson: Nanotechnologist answers the debate surrounding washing rice before cooking it

Do you need to wash your rice before cooking? Science has the answer! 

Growing up in a Chinese household, I was always taught that you had to wash rice multiple times until the water ran clear before you cooked it. When I met my husband, he just added water to the rice and cooked it- to my horror! 

So who is ‘right?’- should you rinse rice before cooking? 

A new study in the journal Food Chemistry compared the effect of washing rice on how sticky and hard it was after cooking. They used glutinous rice, medium grain rice and jasmine rice for their tests, cooking either straight from the bag or after washing with water three times or ten times. 

Some chefs claim that pre-washing rice will change its cooked consistency and that washing away the cloudy water removes starches from the rice making it less sticky when cooked. However, the researchers found that the washing process had no effect on the hardness or stickiness of the cooked rice and that the surface starch that was washed away during rinsing was not the starch that controlled rice stickiness. 

Therefore, if you are washing rice to change its consistency, there is no need to rinse it at all. The type of rice that you have will determine it’s consistency, not the rinsing. 

However, there is another reason to rinse rice- and that is dirt! 

Traditionally, rice was washed to rinse away insects, dust and any remaining rice husks. There is also evidence that microplastics are found in our rice from the packaging process. 

Washing rice before cooking has been shown to remove up to 20 percent of the microplastics from the rice. The pre-rinse also removed 90 percent of the arsenic (which is absorbed by the crop from the soil as it grows) as well as other nutrients including copper, iron, and zinc. 

So if you are washing rice from a cleanliness perspective, then yes, it’s a great way to wash away the dirt, but you will also wash away some of the nutrients in the process. 

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