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Comment by duffyjp | Hacker News Reader

My wife is Japanese and we buy Japanese style rice grown in California (Nishiki Premium). She still complains it isn't as good, but my theory is it's actually the water used in prep. Our Wisconsin water is incredibly hard, and water in Tokyo won't scale a kettle EVER. It's very, very good.

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You could run an experiment pretty trivially to determine if the hardness of the water is the issue. Get one of those charcoal filters, get some coffee filters, and cook some rice with various combinations of the filtering.

The previous place I lived in had very hard water, and I found that running the water through both a coffee filter and then a Brita charcoal filter worked rather well to soften the water and improve the quality of the rice I was cooking.

Try The Rice Factory, a rice importer in New York state. They import prize rice from Japan, in refrigerated containers. It's a clear step up in quality from anything grown in California.

Well yeah, but you're comparing steak from the blue ribbon cow to Tyson, I sure hope they win. You might still be right about regional quality but you should at least compare the best both have to offer.

I would be amazed if rice grown by Japanese immigrants like Koda or Tamkai couldn't reach the level and it really was the land that made the difference.

I would agree that Tamaki Haiga is up there with imported Japanese rice. I think calrose and it's offshoots are less delicious options.

I might agree with your wife. :P

Nishiki uses an offshoot of Calrose rice, which is okay but popular Japanese rice is often Koshihikari or Yumipurika: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishiki_rice (do click the link for SICK web art on a random wikipedia page)

If you can find some https://umamimart.com/products/tamaki-haiga-rice is one of my favs.

Or as someone commented below the rice from The Rice Factory is solid if you are looking for a treat: https://trf-ny.com/collections/rice

I currently have 3 varieties from TRF in my cupboard :D

Nailed it, More often it is the water than the other ingredient even with the coffee

Especially with coffee, the difference between hard and soft water when making coffee is very noticeable.

My family buys bags of flour every time we're in Canada because the old recipes apparently don't taste quite right with anything else. We'll probably keep doing it because it's kind of fun.

Canadian "all-purpose" flour has a higher gluten content than American "all-purpose" flour. It's closer to American "bread flour".

That's aside from whatever harder-to-measure taste differences it might have, but it makes a big difference by itself.

Test your theory by using distilled or soft water to make your rice.

I personally find the idea of water being important to be overstated. It’s frequently repeated as fact but I don’t see it quantified.

The only experiment I have found that attempts to measure this is by Kenji with pizza. In his test, the water did not matter.

https://www.seriouseats.com/does-nyc-water-make-a-difference...

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