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Comment by alangou | Hacker News Reader

There is no feeling so reassuring in Japan as knowing I am always within a 3 minute walk of yet another tuna mayo onigiri.

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Did you ever see whole grain rice onigiri or was it always white short grain rice? I feel like whole grain would be blasphemy over there.

Why would anyone ever voluntarily eat a whole grain rice onigiri?

White rice has one of the highest glycemic indexes.

Japan has a 12% diabetes rate, which is just above the US at 11%.

IIRC sticky rice is the worst among white rices. I find it tasty but try to eat basmati most of the time.

this says it's 7% in Japan: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/diabetes-... , but I found another source that says 12% for 2016.

Diabetes scales with obesity and age. Japan has a very old population, but less obesity than the US. White rice despite its glycemic index is not super high calorie. If it's a contributing favor, it's because of weight-gain, not glycemic index.

edit: better source: https://www.diabetesatlas.org/data/en/country/101/jp.html, https://www.diabetesatlas.org/data/en/country/211/us.html

There's more diabetes in the US.

> White rice has one of the highest glycemic indexes.

This is correct, but do keep in mind the impact that cooling down has on starches.

A fresh bowl of rice is very high, but cool it for a couple of hours and the GI drops considerably.

Cool it overnight and it drops even more. Onigiri is usually in the cooled down to over-night range.

This never makes rice particularly good from a GI perspective, but preparation is a considerable factor.

---

One study, but this is fairly well reproduced: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26693746

And a more general write up: https://www.diabetes.org.uk/guide-to-diabetes/enjoy-food/car...

I don’t get that. I would say the same about white rice. Why would I ever eat it when I could be eating delicious black rice?

And before you start, I eat a gō of rice virtually every day.

I’m genuinely confused about the popularity of white rice.

I had no idea black rice existed until you mentioned it. I imagine that this is likely the same for many others.

Don’t forget red rice! Rice is crazy and my old ideas of wetlands and white rice have been crushed by reality.

Black rice exists, I've seen it in a shop of a friend, though not tasted it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_rice

There are also other food items which have versions that are black in colour, some of which could be not naturally, but by processing them in some way, for example, black garlic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garlic

Googling your favorite food name with "black" as a prefix could be interesting.

ChatGPT, generate for me a program to automate this, given a list of favorite foods.

Black sticky rice is a favorite dessert of mine. I always have to resist it when I see it on a menu at a Thai restaurant.

What is gō? It is hard to Google.

"go of rice" works. It's 3/4 cup.

A Japanese measuring unit for rice, kind of analogous to "one cup" in US kitchens. Measuring cups distributed with rice cookers are usually one gō in volume even in the US.

It’s the Japanese equivalent of “cup” as a measurement unit, and at 180 ml is about 76% of a US cup. Japanese rice cookers are marked and filled in units of gō. You put n gō of uncooked rice in it, and then fill water up to the n mark. One gō is roughly 150 grams of uncooked rice, which amounts to around 530 kcal. Traditionally, a wooden box was used to measure one gō: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Masu,_One-Gō_measure...

Board game. You place one rice grain at the first field and double it for each next field. Eat it all.

It's not blasphemy per se. Wholegrain rice is popular for health reasons, and convenience stores carry wholegrain onigiri sometimes

Whole grain rice and rice with beans in it are very popular in Japan in recent years with mainstream health conscious consumers

(Similarly plant based food has also become much more available in cities)

However the health benefits of brown rice are questionable when the outer layer retains pesticides or other toxins

The onigiri would not stick together. The short grain rice has lots of amylopectin, while whole grain, brown, and basmati have much less.

It would fall apart and be very difficult to eat.

The amylopectin details may be right, but the rest is wrong. Conbini's sell brown rice onigiri (look for 玄米), it's just usually a very limited selection. They don't fall apart, and you eat them the same as normal onigiri.

Have you checked the list of ingredients to check for a binder of some sort?

After posting this comment I then decided to look into it (in my usual way) and just looking for homemade brown rice onigiri what I found was that at least the couple of recipes I looked at used short grain brown rice (which I did not even realize existed) and/or recommended using more water than usual.

Yup, if you want to do it at home, make it a little bit mushier. I don't like it, but it is very doable. Commercially they may use a binder, I don't know, I just wanted to make sure people knew they're available!

I did it tonight and when i picked up the rice i used wet fingers to give it just a touch more binding ability. Worked well. Kids loved it. Am excited to eat the brown rice onigiri tomorrow.

Whole Foods carries a store brand short grain brown rice at a reasonable price that I really like. It’s one of my go-to rices and essentially the only thing I go to Whole Foods for, as I haven’t found a comparable product or price point elsewhere. I think it’s about $2.50/lb these days.

I just finished some tonight, and I’m certain it’s sticky enough to hold its shape.

Why would short grain brown rice have less amylopectin than short grain white rice?

Because all the different rices are quite different plants? I think.

There is no white rice plant. It's all brown rice with the bran removed. Brown short grain rice doesn't have different starches than the same rice without its bran.

Seven different plants called 'rice'. For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rice_cultivars

> The cultivars listed in this article may vary in any number of these characteristics, and most can be eaten whole grain or milled (brown or white).

The article you posted backs up what I'm saying. Brown/white is a result of processing, not genetics.

Here's an interesting article about white and brown rice characteristics:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8116841/

Had so many tuna mayo onigiri from 7/11 for breakfast in Japan.

You've never been to the country side.

3 minute and a little over 100 yen.

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