Carolina Gold was once the most popular rice grown in America (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Carolina Gold was once the most popular rice grown in America (2019)

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108 pointsTomte101 comments

I've had it a few times and it's very good, but not better than most good rice. I think people mostly just don't have nice or fresh rice, they fine Carolina gold which is very well branded and think it's the best. It's not hard to find better than average rice online[0].

0: https://helpatmyhome.com/buy-rice-online/

Are you sure it wasn’t the Carolina brand that sells a “Carolina Gold” that is NOT the real thing?

I’ve had the real Carolina Gold (my parents get it— I’ll have to ask them where/how), and it’s definitely the best rice I’ve ever had (and I eat a lot of rice / all kinds).

His link includes a discussion of Anson Mills which is the best source of the real thing.

(Yes, Carolina-brand "Carolina Gold" is not the same thing and not great).

Ah, my bad for not looking thanks

As a UK resident, reading Anson Mills description of their rice products and how they taste, and what you can do with them is really quite bewildering - 'They can also be prepared in the creamy grits style and all the way to congee, if pressed, or as crisp skillet cakes, both savory and sweet.'

I cook with a range of rices depending on what i'm doing - Arbori, Carnaroli, Basmati and Bomba, but rarely with what I consider an american long grain.

I'll try and track down some of this Carolina Gold and see what I can do with it. Any suggestions for a recipe that shows it off (not knowing what a skillet cake is, for example)?

As a southerner, this sounds pretty good:

https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/carolina-gold-pilau-shri...

Carolina Gold is more of a medium grain. The Anson Mills recipes are quite good and worth a try.

I've made this recipe a few times but never had the proper rice. It's very tasty with jasmine rice, if a little gummy and too watery. Might just be my culinary skill with cook-in-place rice recipes.

https://honest-food.net/lowcountry-shrimp-perloo-recipe/

If you don’t already, consider washing your rice first. I’ve found that to help with gumminess.

Thanks for the tip, I will next time.

Marsh Hen Mill (until recently known as Geechie Boy) is an excellent source from Edisto Island, with even better grits. https://marshhenmill.com/

Anson Mills has their own recipe page [1]. I also buy their polenta and stone cut oatmeal, for which I follow this recipe [2] (though I find my preferred done ness is after ~12 minutes not 20 -- especially when "fresh" from cold storage in the freezer as they recommend).

[1] https://ansonmills.com/recipes

[2] https://ansonmills.com/recipes/422?recipes_by=grain

The best rice I have had had been Koshihikari[1]. I have never had Carolina Gold, branded or otherwise. How would you compare the two if possible?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koshihikari

Is that like calrose rice (eg Nishiki and similar brands?).. ?

Same. I think Carolina Gold is massively overrated, and definitely overpriced. There are thousands of articles hyping the stuff, which makes me curious seeing as Anson Mills seems like a small outfit.

I agree. I was in South Carolina last week and had Carolina gold rice twice- once in a seafood purloo and again in a broiled seafood combo. Had the menus not made a point of noting it was real Carolina gold I don’t think I would have paid any attention to the rice at all. Since they did I made sure to pay attention and I noticed no flavor difference at all. It might have had a different texture, I can’t be sure. End result is this rice means nothing to me.

I had good fresh rice in far northeastern China, and man, it ruined other rice for me, somewhat.

Heilongjiang, Jilin, etc. It's just... better.

Ah now my mouth is unconsciously salivating. Not worth a 28 day quarantine though.

Can I just mention how charming it is that there is such as thing as a USDA Rice Research Center? People throw bureaucracy around as a bad word but bureaucratic capacity brings us so many positive things. Let's hear it for the deep rice state.

What else does it do and what cost? What is the cost benefit analysis of the rice research center?

Let's see, one of the benefits is probably that we're not all starving to death right now. Not sure if there are others.

I guess you could get rid of it to save every American 5¢ annually and trade that for a chance of a future rice disease wiping out our crops. That might make sense, in the same way that the Texas electric grid is very efficient.

Just wait until the populace at large finds out what is happening to their bananas. People will be screaming about why there was no American Banana Bureau Association

Gotta give the last President props for doing more than any President before him to try and turn the US into a banana republic.

Where is the evidence it prevents starvation? Most of the crops in the US are wheat, soybeans, and corn. The rice crop is negligible. They could use that in other crops.

The USDA ARS has dozens of labs and research centers for wheat, soybeans, corn and more[1].

[1] https://www.ars.usda.gov/people-locations/find-a-location/

That has nothing to do with the rice research. I’m not against ARS I’m debating the usefulness of the rice sector.

Perhaps, we view it as in our interests that people in other countries aren’t starving?

There is no proof of that, the fact that most crops are destroyed to prevent food prices from crashing and how milk farmers are pouring their milk down the drain is proof to the contrary.

Dairy producers in wisconsin dump milk and put artificially short ‘sell by’ dates on their packages because they need to maintain a regular flow of product out the doors (and cash flow in) to maintain their operation. Milkers don’t keep producing milk if they aren’t milked regularly.

Whether or not the US funds rice research because poor allies can’t seems completely disconnected.

That is an example of waste, the US has so much wasted crops they make HFCS from corn and biodiesel from it, there is no shortage of the big 3 crops, nor is there evidence these institutions do any worthwhile work. They gave Japanese wheat during WW2 and the Japanese invented instant noodles. There is no evidence of any benefit of this rice research, and nobody has proven otherwise.

You’re absolutely right that milk dumping, corn syrup, biodiesel are examples of waste, but they are market choices. Overproduction assures supply and keeps food prices low. It’s terrible for all sorts of other reasons; I just find it curious that you are lumping all these issues in with your objection about agricultural research. Ag is a huge field and industry. They’re not all the same problem.

You might be right that I’m lumping it incorrectly. The subsidies are the biggest problem, and I am suspecting that the subsidies fund this research, the Harber-Bosch process is the biggest driver for high crop yield as far as I know. Even without any of these institutions the US had never had a famine, so I don’t see their benefits I am saddened that they oppress native crops and also prioritize yield over long term farming such as wasteful crop rotation, and I haven’t seen signs of their benefits. I’m not against government intervention or “public good” but when I don’t see any signs of it, I’m suspicious of it as not only wasteful but harmful.

Fresh milk is wasteful, we could move to powdered milk, ultra pastuized, or the Canadian model but as long as subsidies exist they will continue this non green and wasteful spending. My point is the market choices are only existing as subsidies exist.

I don’t disagree with your general concerns around subsidies; however, I am from, and reside, within an agricultural region - and count among my family and friends conventional, urban, and permaculture farmers - and I do believe you are taking an incomplete and too narrow a view here.

Do you care to explain or show me a resource I can get a better understanding of? I know friends of friends who are farmers and the only thing I know are that farmers are pretty high tech and educated, they grow according to subsides, and a lot of their friends growing up died in random accidents around the farm.

The USDA ARS is the body responsible for the rice research center.

What would be the negative from eliminating the rice research center?

Rice is the third-largest grain crop in the country. The US is the fifth-largest exporter of rice on Earth. "Negligible" is a ridiculous descriptor.

> Let's see, one of the benefits is probably that we're not all starving to death right now.

This right here. Our short-sighted attitude towards fundamental public infrastructure like this never ceases to amaze me.

The US relies on corn, soybeans and wheat. The rice research doesn’t show any evidence of functionality.

What was the cost benefit analysis of quantum mechanics related research before it became one of the building blocks of many modern technologies?

Rice is quite literally the only reason the earth can support 7 billion people. Its cost benefit analysis is making sure we don't all die.

Well, no, we've already got rice. Maybe these people are making it better, but just the fact that rice is valuable doesn't justify anything on its own.

Also the IRRI which is I believe the Philippines, Vietnam, Lao and Cambodia who have the rice research cooperative agreement. They do a lot of work on Golden rice.

Doesn’t have to be a govt department though. India is still primarily agricultural but almost all agri research happens at the universities. Still funded by the government but they do the dual work of training the next generation as well.

Plenty of agricultural research happening at the universities-- indeed they have a whole bunch of extramural cooperations.

https://www.ars.usda.gov/research/collaborations/?modeCode=6...

But this is a big facility right in the middle of the rice belt and big fields for large research projects in cooperation with universities. UArkansas has a facility nextdoor/shares resources, and it's not too far from UA Little Rock. https://aaes.uada.edu/research-locations/rice-research-exten...

There's even a Rice University.

I've benefitted an enormous amount from the USDA soybean research. They run soybase.org, a repository of all things data around soybean cultivars. In my experience, no other crop has a database as complete as soybase. Perhaps it's a political phenomenon? The US pumps a lot of money into soybean so other countries are not that interested in soybean research, while for example rice databases are splintered across China, Japan, the Philippines etc..

The story of heirloom fruit and vegetables is sad. People spent their entire lives sometimes creating delicious varieties only to be blown out by produce that was cheap to grow and looked good on the supermarket shelf (taste didn’t matter).

Apples are a great example. Almost everything in the supermarket (save for a few varieties) is bland and mealy. It LOOKS great though, and that’s all that matters.

> People spent their entire lives sometimes creating delicious varieties only to be blown out by produce that was cheap to grow and looked good on the supermarket shelf (taste didn’t matter).

Why would taste not matter? Surely people take into account taste when purchasing food. But they also decide to make tradeoffs in how much extra money to spend for the additional rate versus other things they could try with the additional money.

But given two foods at the same price and nutritional qualities, surely taste is a prominent factor.

It's a pretty widely studied artifact of mass retail that appearance was valued over taste, because appearance is immediately obvious while taste must be remembered and most consumers don't. In other words, it's immediately obvious what produce looks good, while knowing what produce tastes good requires time and attention. Most people don't really remember the difference between varieties of apples, for example, which are currently undergoing a bit of a renaissance as breeders have discovered the value of branding and marketing campaigns similar to those used for manufactured goods. The general perception is that this trend is starting to go away only now, as a largely internet driven food culture has emerged that values unusual varieties.

Moreover, for the retailer themselves, durability and shelf life is perhaps the single most important property in today's long supply chains, because produce is subject to rough handling and consumers absolutely do not purchase bruised fruit or wilted greens. Unfortunately it often runs opposite to other metrics of quality for produce.

> because appearance is immediately obvious while taste must be remembered and most consumers don't.

I find this hard to believe. Foods and taste is one of the most common experiences people have and converse about. Your last paragraph is just supporting that people might not be willing or able to spend the extra money for the tastiest fruits and vegetables.

Taste doesn’t matter in the majority of the fruit and vegetable market because it is not perceivable at the time of purchase.

Unless people are generally more forgetful than me, they can probably remember that the red delicious or gala apple they bought last week tastes worse than a honey crisp or cosmic crisp or whatever.

People might be choosing less tasty fruits and vegetables because they are cheaper, but they are not ignoring tastier ones because they do not care about taste.

A huge amount of the marketplace just thinks "apple" and doesn't note the variety.

A lot of us pay attention now, but did my mom pay so much attention to varietal when shopping? I don't think so.

I thought I hated apples growing up. The only thing my mom bought was a red delicious. Later in life I tried a honeycrisp and wow! Turns out I actually love apples.

There is no choice they simply aren’t available because they don’t transport or store well

Right, so it is too expensive to have those fruits flown in, not that people care about looks over taste.

Little known fact but mass-agriculture varieties of fruits and vegetables often have far less nutrition than heirloom varieties.

This is a myth. They usually taste worse, because they've been bred to grow to a uniform size, to be pretty, and to have a long shelf-life.

As far as nutrition is concerned, it only seems this way because they're pumped full of water and end up tasting just like bags of mildly tomato flavoured water.

If you take a heirloom variety and a mass-produced hybrid variety and grow them in the same good soil in full sun, their nutritional value should be about the same.

it should be, but it is not the way it works. The same happens with the tomato.

Homegrown tomatoes and tomatoes from the supermarket are two totally different fruits. They don’t even taste the same.

Same goes with strawberries and probably a lot of things.

I tasted heirloom tomatoes and they weren’t special

I was with you until the second paragraph. Aren’t we having a kind of apple renaissance right now? Admittedly I know very little about apples, but when I was a kid the supermarkets basically just had red delicious and Granny Smith. Then came the galas & fujis and now my local supermarket has like 5 or 6 types of red apple, all of which are way better than anything I ate growing up (honey crisp are my current favorites).

Probably depends on where you shop and live. My parents live a few states over. Their local grocery will sometimes devote 2-3 whole rows (back/front) to different apple varieties (like 6+ varieties, I think). Local to me, we get green/red and sometimes other varieties in specialty grocery stores.

Red Delicious, the worst apple in the world, is finally on the way out. For decades people have bought it because they were used to it or that's what was available. Truly terrible, with thick skin and a bitter, mealy interior.

My team's admin used to buy apples for us, including some Red Delicious. I explained that they were terrible so she stopped. It was easy to find supporting evidence in the form of 5 articles with titles like "Red Delicious is the worst apple in the world." No reason to buy them, except that they look pretty.

Recently there have been lots of new varieties, mostly distinguished by their good flavor and texture. Honey Crisp, as you mentioned, is one example. Cosmic Crisp is another: first available in 2019?, developed and grown in Washington state. Not sure if it's available in other states yet.

Red Delicious was actually a great apple when it was introduced. Read up on it the history of how this changed is interesting and kind of sad. The problem wasn’t the fruit, the issue was people could slowly change it while keeping the name.

As consumers began to purchase more of their food from large supermarkets, the apple's popularity encouraged commercial growers to increasingly select for longer storage and cosmetic appeal rather than flavor and palatability, which resulted in a less palatable fruit.[8][9][2] In particular the selection of redder fruit caused deselection of flavor, and the genes that produced the yellow stripes on the original fruit were on the same chromosomes as those for the flavor-producing compounds.[2] Breeding for uniformity and storability favored a thicker skin.[2] Later, as other cultivars entered supermarkets, demand for the 'Red Delicious' declined.[9][10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious

Partly the governments fault. Color is part of the USDA’s grading criteria. Flavor is not part of the criteria.

Is that really the government’s fault? You can’t quantify flavor, people like the color red.

> You can’t quantify flavor

You can quantify things like sweetness or even presence of certain aromatics. If the technology to do this was tricky 80 years ago, it's much less so now.

Whether that would be helpful or not, I don't know. In part because...

> people like the color red.

It's actually an example of HN favorite Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

You can't taste an apple before buying it, usually. And certainly not the specific particular apple you are picking. So people have to pick based on qualities like visual appearance or firmness (or in some cases smell, but that's less helpful with apples than with some other fruits). A nice bright red apple was at some point, at least with some varieties, taken as a good proxy for good flavor/soundness.

Until growers, to take advantage of that, started breeding for color at the expense of flavor. Goodhart's Law.

People like an apple that is not rotten or diseased and tastes good, they were choosing red color at the market hoping it would represent that when you can't cut open an apple before buying it. I don't think most apple consumers actually prioritize color over taste.

Great post, I didn’t know about goodhart’s law. I see that a lot with standardization tests.

>I don't think most apple consumers actually prioritize color over taste.

It’s why those free samples are so great. I think they’re very effective at selling the brands and tastes.

I think this process is now underway on honeycrisps. Lately they seem to have thicker skins and less crispness than in the early days.

I'm not sure if that's necessarily a trend. There can be good batches and bad batches, since these varieties are sourced from many different growers. It's even possible to have a good year and a bad year, due to weather. In wine, people talk about good vintages and bad ones, so the same can exist in other fruit.

The first time I tried Honeycrisps, I didn't like them and avoided them for years. Then I tried again and got much better ones.

I first bought Cosmic Crisp in a local grocery store, and they were great. Then I bought them directly form an orchard in the part of the state where they are grown (about 100 miles from here), and they were totally bland and thoroughly unimpressive. Now I'm back to buying them in grocery stores, and those are fine.

Very interesting. I have some pretty strong habits (in addition to the obvious stuff like firmness) in picking veggies and fruit, like narrow cucumbers and small tomatoes. When I buy Apples I look for strong stripes. Mostly honey crisp and royal gala though, don't like *delicious.

It depends on where you live. If you are in a place where this is true, then enjoy the bounty and count your blessings.

Not just Apples and veggies - check out Jimmy Red corn. It used to be a favorite of bootleggers, making illicit corn whiskey (aka moonshine), but was nearly lost. It's now available for sale again, both as seed corn and as a whiskey.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/01/02/574367086/fr...

In the Bay Area, what you have said in the second sentence is thankfully not the case at all. A few varieties that I have tasted in the Bay Area (most of them quite regularly):

1. Red Delicious 2. Gala 3. Fuji 4. Pippin 5. Macintosh 6. Granny Smith 7. Golden Yellow 8. Mutsu 9. Pink Lady 10. Arkansas Black 11. Jonagold 12. Golden Ambrosia 13. Honeycrisp 14. Braeburn 15. Empire 16. Enterprise

Aside, take care not too eat too much rice grown in the Carolinas. (Brand names notwithstanding.) Apparently the arsenic used for cotton is easily absorbed by rice grown in that region.

I thought this was more of an Ark-La-Tex problem

Careful, LaTeX fans can get pretty annoying if you do anything but praise it.

ArkLaTex compiles .tex files to the Advanced Research Knowledge format.

Really want to upvote the joke but can’t bring myself to reward the implicit criticism of LaTex ….

You can find it here: https://www.carolinaplantationrice.com/store/products/Caroli...

This one seems popular too: https://ansonmills.com/products/23

I think that the OP link is actually the supplier for Anson but not 100% sure

If any of you had read the article, you'd know that these are the two commercial outfits that grow the stuff, and they both grew out of the same university project.

I unfortunately waited too long to pull the trigger on ordering and now the Carolina Plantation website appears to be all sold out…

I believe that’s also all she wrote on the year/season, so unlikely that it comes back in stock. I don’t really feel like paying the Anson Mills prices but maybe I’ll have to..

https://www.carolinaplantationrice.com/store/products/Caroli...

This product appears to be substantively the same thing and is still in stock, its just not grown in South Carolina..

Best of Luck!

Thanks it looks good. I wound up not getting it though as the shipping prices were somewhat prohibitive. $18 for the 2 lb bag. Not in the mood to spend $28 on two pounds of rice no matter how good it is.. will stick with Nishiki cal rose rice I guess..

If you really want to see good quality rice, take a look at the quality and selection of product that an expert Pakistani chef will use for a top quality biryani. Or the rice that Afghans will use when cooking a Palaw the slow way. Generally within the category of long grain basmati, but there's a lot of difference between sub-types.

Long grain basmati that has aged a couple of years. I dont know if you can find aged basmati in the US.

Sure, In the Bay Area you can get aged basmati at Vik's Market in Berkeley and various markets in Union City. I would guess any place with an Afghanistan-born enclave would have it somewhere.

In the Bay area the largest concentration of Afghans is in Fremont, there's at least two specialty grocery stores that stock much the same as what you'd see in Kabul.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=afghans+f...

> Long grain basmati that has aged a couple of years. I dont know if you can find aged basmati in the US.

I believe almost all Basmati rice is aged, the length of aging and of course grades of rice can vary.

You can find it in any Indian grocery store since Basmati grown in India accounts for 65% of the international trade in basmati rice. At least in the Bay Area it can also be found in several/all Costco. Kirkland Basmati rice claims it is aged at least 1 year.

That's really interesting. In Greece Carolina (Καρολίνα) is the name of a type of rice, but I had never realised it's named after a brand as there's no Carolina brand in the Greek market.

Apparently it is essential to Hoppin' John that actually tastes good

It’s related to Hoppin John in so far as white Americans have a deep fetish for food that they can tell themselves is similar to what slaves ate. Gullah recipes are the latest incarnation.

I think it’s all patronizing, at best. In fact I have a framed, handwritten sign I took from a gift shop in Charleston 30 years ago advertising benne seed wafers as something slaves “brought to the new world for good luck”.

Look I have no reason not to believe you (nor am I a white American) but when I had it at Landry's on New Year's Day they sure didn't market it that way (nor did it taste that great).

> Unlike grocery store rice, which just smells starchy, the Carolina Gold filled the room with a nutty, earthy aroma that had me craving white rice more than I've ever craved it before. Biting into my first spoonful, I could feel the firm texture of each and every grain in my mouth. It had the satisfying bite Shields told me about, the nuttiness, even a floral quality I hadn't quite expected. Yes, it was exactly what I wanted rice to taste like.

Sounds like Basmati tbh.

Is this just an ad for Carolina Gold rice?

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