Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

alecco

Cooking methods to remove arsenic from rice:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...

Summary of bes method (PBA): pre-boil for 5', remove water, add fresh water, then cook rice normally.

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S00489697203687...

View on HN

You can reduce the chance of arsenic contaminated rice (and citrus), by avoiding crops grown in former cotton growing regions. An arsenic based pesticide was widely used on cotton crops, contaminating the soil. Texas rice and citrus are much more likely to contain high levels of arsenic than California grown crops.

Unfortunately the rice grown in California is known to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.

Can you elaborate on this?

My understanding was that aresenic was the reason for any cancer warnings.

I'm just making a joke. It may be less toxic that other states' but in California we have to label it because the Prop 65 threshold is 1/1000th of the “no observable effect level."

Thank you so much for an actual action item. I wish that it was possible that each post could have one as useful as this.

Good luck finding large enough amounts of clean water for rewashing rice in Haiti.

https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/healthprotection/resources/...

Par-boiling then steaming also happens to be The Right Way to cook it, to my taste.

Won’t work with a rice cooker though :/

maybe you could pre heat the water pour the rice for 5 minutes and then start fresh with new water.

That is likely to mess up the taste really hard. Rice cookers are designed to cook the rice to just the right favor. But if you use something that is pre-cooked… It's definitely going to overcook it.

Rice cookers are designed to reach a certain humidity level, you can choose how much under/over cooked you can make the rice by putting less/more water

You are probably referring the old style rice cooker. Modern rice cooker does much more than that, with controlled temperature and duration, and probably have multi preset for each thing you want to cook. And it probably don't expect people to put pre-cooked rice into it at first place.

People use both of them. The old style one for heating dishes or making soups, because it is simple to control manually. The new style one for cooking rice, because it taste better and much unlikely to mess up like old style one.

Source: I am a Taiwanese, and you literally see both of them in every home here.

I had no idea the other style existed

Maybe someone needs to make a rice cooker which does the 5min boil, discard method automatically. I’d buy it.

Does this work with lead and cadmium as well?

Wow thanks for the simple graphic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com