Edit: wow thank you for the awards!! And for the responses 🙂 my curious mind is at ease
In: Chemistry
It is precooked rice that then dried. The process make cracks in the rice so water can penetrate it faster when you cook it again.
It isn’t really about what’s in the rice, but what has been done to the rice.
Rice has a few different layers, and how you deal with those layers results in a few different kinds of rice.
If you take a grain of rice and want to use it for food, you’ll have to take off some layers to get to the good grain. Take off the first bit, and you have brown rice. Take off a little more, and you have more standard white rice. Take off even more, and you have just the innermost layer that cooks much faster.
Additionally, the producers will cook this milled down rice, then dehydrate the grains before packaging. This is what allows you to cook it quickly, as all you really need to accomplish is rehydration.
It also removes nearly all the nutrition available in rice. This is why a lot of instant rice is also “enriched” with added vitamins/minerals
I didn’t even know instant rice was a thing. Third world problems.
And there’s instant wine? How do they make instant wine?
It is precooked. Dry heated in a 400 deg C air blower, then wet down with water, then dry heated in a 300 deg C blower. Source: used to make this rice for Uncle Ben’s. The intermediate wet down was a breakthrough and allowed the cutdown from 8 min rice to 3 min rice. The resulting rice is way more fragile than normal rice.
rice is made of long tightly wound strings of starch molecules. Cooking rice unwinds those strings allowing water to get between the molecules. Drying the rice after cooking leaves the space behind so water can get back in easily.
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Everyone is stating how cooking and drying changes the grain and that is true.
However something they aren’t mentioning: Water. There is more water inside the grain of instant rice.
The difference is so large you can make a significant saving by not buying instant rice or choosing an instant rice that has been dried more than others.
Next time compare a couple of brans and work out how much dry mass the nutrition label accounts for, the rest of the weight is water.
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Wait, where is this? Why do you guys have instant rice? It only takes a few minutes to cook it in a pressure cooker
Edit: why is any1 downvoting me, it’s a genuine question
As others have mentioned, the rice is cooked, or partially cooked in a way that cracks the starchy outer layers and allows it to absorb water much more quickly.
One interesting tidbit: if you attempt to salvage a water-damaged electronic device by placing it in a container of rice, use instant rice. It absorbs water much more effectively than traditional rice. (But really, do yourself a favor and go get some crystal style cat litter, which is made of silica gel, and is way better than rice)
Edit: I’ve been reminded by some helpful redditors that using rice to rescue electronics is generally a bad idea. In fact, open air is generally more effective than a container of rice. Here’s a helpful article from a few years back that describes tests of several alternative methods. https://www.gazelle.com/thehorn/2014/05/06/gazelles-guide-water-damage-truth-rice-galaxy-everything/
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