IS IT NECESSARY TO WASH RICE BEFOR YOU COOK IT OR NOT?

Many people have had this questions on their mind for a very long time. I have even seen some arguments about it among my male friends who try to know if it makes sense to wash or rinse rice before cooking. Those that wash rice prior to cooking try to explain that it is the right thing to do while those on the other hand also think it is the right thing to do.

So, Is It Necessary To Wash Rice Before You Cook It?

The answer to this can be a YES and a NO. You ask why? Often, we only do things because that is the way it has always been done and do not bother to ask, “why?” Such is the case with the issue of rinsing of rice in water before we cook. Some people even soak or parboil the rice and change the water after some minutes of cooking –like it is recommended we do with beans if we don’t want it to make us fart (more) after eating.

To explain the YES,

Rinsing rice has been done for ages to rid the grains of surface starches, prevents clumping, and yields a clean, fresh taste. If you rinse rice very well, the cooked rice will have a reduced likelihood of clumping together because you have removed some of the total starch present (surface starch).

Some types of rice from some parts of the world are processed with talc -a mineral made up of hydrated magnesium silicate in order to give it a whiter and cleaner appearance. These types of rice need a rinse to remove this talc. Sometimes when rice has been packed and stored for long, you see some kind of dust on their surface when you take them out, washing will get rid of dusts like these and sometimes few weevils in the rice.

To explain the NO, 

Starch is Carbohydrate so when you wash it away, you wash away nutrients but there is more of that inside the rice. You may not want to worry much about this. However, to make milled white rice healthier and more nutritious in countries like the United States, it is required that processors enrich it with vitamins and other nutrients.

These fortifications appear as a dusty layer on the individual grains. If you want to also preserve those nutrients, washing is not for you – it is NO-NO. But if you don’t need this nutrients, probably because you are eating your rice with some rich vegetable sauce and other nutritious foods, you can wash it off.

Conclusively, rinsing rice prior to cooking or not depends on what you want out of your rice. Many people either rinse it before cooking it or not because they cannot distinguish between a dust that comes as a result of fortification and that which is there as a result of dirt.

Research has shown that a cup of the cooked rice has in it roughly 200 calories, most of which comes in the form of starch, which turns into sugar, and often thereafter body fat. Also, a study at the Harvard School of Public Health showed that cooked white rice contributes to the development of type II Diabetes. So now that we know this, are we going to cut down on eating rice? Are we going to stop eating rice totally? I don’t think this is possible.

Rice is a staple food eaten all over the world because it is relatively cheap, easy to cook and can be cooked in several forms. Rice can be cooked white and eaten with soups/stews, cooked as jollof, fried and coconut rice. In Africa and parts of the Carribean, rice is mixed with beans to make it more delicious and nutritious but just like many carbohydrate foods, eating much of them as we eat rice can lead to intake of a large amount of calories.

REF: Food Precessing, Knowledgebase