Cook rice in a coffee percolator to avoid arsenic | Hacker News Reader

Cook rice in a coffee percolator to avoid arsenic

bbc.co.uk

89 pointsflarg56 comments

Original research has much better information:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

For example, the far simpler method of soaking and then just using more water and draining the rice.

> Traditional S.E. Asian methods of rice cooking involved extensive rinsing of the uncooked grain followed by cooking the rice in a large excess of water and discarding that water on cessation of cooking and this was found to reduce Asi content of food by up to 45% [10] and 57% [8] when Asi free water was used.

Oh that's how I cook it. I prefer the texture, I didn't realise it had any other benefits.

I was taught to wash rice 3 times and to soak before cooking, especially for longer-grain rice as it softens the rice.

I wonder if we'd be here if our ancestors cooked rice in a way that did not reduce the arsenic content.

Probably. The human body is mightily adaptable.

I've always thought that washing rice removed some of the starch which caused it to become sticky.

Guess there was a side benefit to all that!

By washing rice you remove starch dust. And starch is what makes rice sticky.

Washing rice, at least in Japan, is probably a bit different than most people imagine. You first add water to your rice and stir it around. Then you discard the water. Next, using the palm of your hand you grind the rice in a circular motion. You have to press quite hard because you are trying to polish the rice and remove any oxidized bran from the outside of each kernel. This both improves the texture and flavour of the rice. Finally, you fill up the bowl with water, stir and dispose of the cloudy water. Repeat rinsing until the water is no longer cloudy. The whole process takes about 5 minutes and a good 5-6 times the volume of rice in water.

Rice grown in the southern US has relatively high levels of arsenic - some quick math based on UN standards for the developing world says that you could plausibly eat enough to reach the low end of measurable cancer risk. Most of us don't though.

If you don't like this answer, eat Asian-grown rice (~75% less arsenic), rinse your rice (~25% less arsenic), or cook it in substantially more water (~50% less arsenic).

Might need to be more specific about where in Asia that Asian-grown rice originates. China has a big problem with heavy metal contamination of rice. One of many stories about it: http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/after-cadmium...

Arsenic amount depends on where the rice is grown (largely based on historical pesticide use). http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-much...

It may be a British use of the word but the advice is to cook in a coffee percolator and they illustrate a drip brewer. These are two different appliances to my knowledge. A coffee percolator is a pot of water with a tube in the center which directs hot water up and over the coffee. The water essentially cycles as long as you keep boiling it.

A drip brewer cycles the water once. I can see that being better for rinsing away impurities but also requiring quite a bit more water.

I'm American and a percolator and drip brewer are two different things for me as well. I used to have a percolater but it's been a long time since I've seen one. Maybe most people don't know what they are anymore.

I think the article is confused itself. Above the image it says:

  On grounds of practicality, "a stove-top percolator would not 
  work", Meharg admits. It would have to be a drip-brewer.

My idea of a percolator has always been this: http://www.amazon.com/Bialetti-Express-6-Cup-Stovetop-Espres...

The water doesn't cycle, it goes through the ground coffee exactly once.

I think that the difference with drip coffee is the temperature / pressure of the water.

Wouldn't any technique that washes/leaches arsenic from rice also remove similar amounts of nutrients like essential vitamins and minerals?

A recent Consumer Reports article says:

You may be able to cut your exposure to inorganic arsenic in any type of rice by rinsing raw rice thoroughly before cooking, using a ratio of 6 cups water to 1 cup rice, and draining the excess water afterward. That is a traditional method of cooking rice in Asia. The modern technique of cooking rice in water that is entirely absorbed by the grains has been promoted because it allows rice to retain more of its vitamins and other nutrients. But even though you may sacrifice some of rice's nutritional value, research has shown that rinsing and using more water removes about 30 percent of the rice's inorganic arsenic content.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-much...

Traditional cooking of rice depends on the strain, basmatic / jasmin rice is and was never rinsed.

Traditionally only rinse rice strains that have a very high concentration of starch, e.g. Thai white rice or most Japanese rice varieties.

If you don't rinse those types of rice you'll get something similar to porridge or boiled flour in texture.

Yep. Sushi rice you soak for 30 minutes, other Japanese varietals you hand wash until the water is clear. You're supposed to use cold water, though I suppose warm water might possibly extract more impurities.

Honestly, I don't believe this coffee drip method will work that well, even if it does cook the rice properly (which I doubt). It re-uses the arsenic water unless you toss it, which is a big waste of water.

What I would totally buy right now is a drip-coffee-rice-cooker that used a smaller amount of water than a full pot of coffee, but cycled it through a water filter/purifier. At the very least it might lead to tastier rice, though I have no idea if a charcoal or other filter would actually trap/remove arsenic.

You eat rice for calories. Not much point in worrying about vitamins in it.

There are some people who are very poor. I'm glad the FDA is requiring it for enriched rice. I thought enriched rice only had vitamin B, but it has D,C, iron, and more. When I am backpacking; I will buy enriched rice next time. Whenever I think about food, I think about the North Korean that was on here a few weeks ago. He woke me up to the fact we have it pretty good, and just how wrong it can go with the wrong leadership.

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...

> Wouldn't any technique that washes/leaches arsenic from rice also remove similar amounts of nutrients like essential vitamins and minerals?

If you poor (real poor not 1st world poor) then this might be an issue. But I think the research is towards rich westerners who can afford coffee percolators and die of things like cancer, not things like rickets.

Can we get the USDA/FDA to, oh I dunno, test rice samples for arsenic and put those levels on labels? Maybe, gasp, even prevent the sale of rice with excessively high arsenic concentrations?

In 2012 the FDA was busy doing the science and projecting their risk assessment for arsenic in rice should be published in 2014. Any limits and associated testing would come after that.

I don't see the assessment published or an update. Maybe they are still working, maybe it was canceled.

Probably more like promises of cushy industry jobs if the FDA employees make the "right" decision to not upset the apple cart.

You know big rice, always throwing their weight around at the FDA.

You think that rice isn't produced by multi-billion dollar corporations that have spent decades honing their lobbying techniques? Like ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis-Dreyfus Group, look them up. These are the same guys who are able to maintain agricultural subsidies larger than NASA's budget as well as regulations mandating ethanol in gasoline which works out to be just another kind of subsidy.

I suppose that's reasonable.

Isn't the average lifespan in Japan longer than just about any other country? And don't they eat lots of rice? I guess I wonder how much of a problem this really is.

I don't have official numbers, but this is very likely not the case. Japan used to have reports of lots of people with incredibly long lifespans. A few years ago there was a huge uproar when it was discovered that many of these cases were just pension fraud. The families had a deal with the doctor not to report the death so that they could continue to receive pension payments. A quick Google search didn't yield much in the way of results, but I remember it being in all the news in Japan about 3 or 4 years ago.

I find this kind of fraud amusing for some reason, so thanks for sharing. However, even if there are many cases it can still work out to only a tiny fraction. Around 1.2 million people die per year in Japan, yet I would call 1000 cases of fraud per year "many".

Boil it like pasta and strain (fine mesh) after ~15 minutes, back into the (empty) hot pot and let it sit covered another 5. I just tried this and it the rice comes out as good as in a rice cooker, maybe a touch fluffier+stickier (I'm using Calrose).

Would that technique not leech out the majority of the vitamins and minerals, too?

Does rice really have many? Honest question -- I always thought of rice a little grains of starch.

That's always been my take on rice too... as mainly a macro for carbs (or with brown rice, a bit of fiber).

There's enriched rice which has added vitamins. Washing enriched rice _should_ wash out whatever's been added. I don't know about other types of rice, but I've heard rice is supposed to be neutral to the meal, so I assume not.

USDA has a nutrient database. It isn't always completely accurate, but it is probably a lot better than conventional wisdom ;-)

http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/6568?fgcd=&manu=&lfac...

Probably in brown rice (but then, they are packed in the fibers). White rice is as close to pure starch that we have.

If you look at eastern cuisines that are heavy on white rice - rice provides bulk of the calories, but the real nutrition comes from fish, meat, legumes, spices, vegetables and so on.

Maybe Parboiled rice is the alternative. Here the rice with the husk is first boiled and water drained off. It also boost its nutritional profile and change its texture[1]. In many places the par boiled rice while cooking is boiled again with excess water and the water is drained away.

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

Rice cooker.

Easy to cook, and whilst I've no idea how it registers on the arsenic levels, I'm fairly sure there are millions of people to check against...

Anyone know where Qdoba and Chipotle source their rice from?

Don't order rice in your burrito anything ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinoa#Nutritional_value

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/...

What are you getting at? Neither of those pages mention the arsenic discussed by the article

He's promotion quinoa as a rice replacement. I approve of the sentiment that rice is shitty and quinoa (I love quinoa cus-cus) is better, but it has nothing to do at all with the article itself.

Thought process: "Hmm.. that sucks I like rice. I wonder what I can eat instead" .. check comments .. learn about Quinoa = relevant.

Yes, just offering an alternative if anyone was interested in a replacement for rice.

Quinoa cooks faster than rice, but it needs to be washed/rinsed thoroughly beforehand to remove the saponin soap like coating.

Please give some context next time.

BTW, with washing do you mean in a similar way to rinsing rice a few times?

Rinse quinoa until there's no more foam/bubbles from the saponin.

It's easiest with a very fine stainless steel sieve or strainer, like this: http://files.meilleurduchef.com/mdc/photo/product/mfr/fine-m...

Alternatively, a large jar or bowl with enough headroom to fill with extra water that can be poured off and drained.

I don't know if it varies by location but any time I have bought quinoa in the UK it has come pre-rinsed.

Here in the States read the label. Some varieties are pre-rinsed others are not. Don't mix it up. DAMHIKIJK.

And quinoa ain't so cheap in comparison to rice.

"Let then eat Quinoa"

Quinoa is a great alternative to rice.

More rice science & nutrition:

  An undergraduate student at the College of Chemical 
  Sciences in Sri Lanka and his mentor have been tinkering 
  with a new way to cook rice that can reduce its calories 
  by as much as 50 percent and even offer a few other 
  added health benefits. 


  "What we did is cook the rice as you normally do, but 
  when the water is boiling, before adding the raw rice, 
  we added coconut oil—about 3 percent of the weight of 
  the rice you're going to cook," said Sudhair James, who 
  presented his preliminary research at National Meeting & 
  Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on 
  Monday. "After it was ready, we let it cool in the 
  refrigerator for about 12 hours. That's it."


  Not all starches, as it happens, are created equal. 
  Some, known as digestible starches, take only a little 
  time to digest, are quickly turned into glucose, and 
  then later glycogen. Excess glycogen ends up adding to 
  the size of our guts if we don't expend enough energy to 
  burn it off. Other starches, meanwhile, called resistant 
  starches, take a long time for the body to process, 
  aren't converted into glucose or glycogen because we  
  lack the ability to digest them, and add up to fewer 
  calories.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/25/s...

Nutritionally, it seems pretty good.

But agriculturally, it's hard to grow and has led to a lot of economic damage. So I've had a hard time justifying a switch.

In that case just use bulgur.

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