Lost in Choosing the Best Rice for You? Find Out How to Make Rice Selection in America!

Here, we will only look at the practical aspects. Before choosing rice, you must first find out which kind of you want and what quality standard you have from that rice. Broadly, there are about four options when the quality expected is from the rice in Japan or Korea.

The very first thing you need to figure out is what kind of rice you want. If you take a close look at the rice bag, you will find a specific word listed above for each type of rice. From there, you can choose products from your favorite brand or by any standards you have. Sometimes people are worried that inexpensive rice such as from Costco’s rice quality is too bad, or products of Japanese companies may be radioactive. I will put this in more detail in my next blog post, but here, I will only mention the milling company situation briefly. There are only about 15 rice milling companies in California, all of which come from farms in the same region. Also, only three of the milling companies produce premium med grain (organic). Each Brand, represented in the label, merely places an order to the same milling companies that meet its logistic demand.

Because companies on the sack really do not have control over the quality, I will not recommend a brand here. Everyone has a favorite brand, but personally, I only choose the most inexpensive one among the rice type I like. Some people may argue that some particular brands communicate with milling companies well to maintain their quality standards. I would not want to make any counterargument to that opinion from those who have never experienced the field. One thing I could say from my experience is that the milling companies in America are not swayed by buyers and no food expert was able to distinguish the brand in the blind test when the rice is the same type.

This so far is the knowledge we needed in order to choose which rice to buy from the market. Now, let’s find out about the rice we eat from Japanese or Korean restaurants. Most restaurants in America uses American rice except very few high-end restaurants. The restaurants I am mentioning here are only Korean and Japanese as they only eat either medium or short-grain rice. More than 75% of them use Calrose, 15% use premium med, and 10% use short grain. For Japanese restaurants that sell mostly sushi rolls, Calrose takes about 90% of the market share. When sushi is the main seller, restaurants use either premium med or short grain.

In many Japanese restaurants in America, med grain rice is not really a choice but a must-have ingredient. Most of the sushi chefs who started their careers in the US cannot handle short-grain. Medium grain and short-grain are completely different in its cooking, sushi seasoning, and shaping sushi rice. Short grain is a lot more moisture and sticky. Households that make only limited quantity may not be able to tell difference, but that little difference significantly affects the food quality when cooked in large volumes for business. Hence many sushi restaurants use medium-grain rice not only for its cost-effectiveness but for its quality management purposes as well.

Rice is a first step to learn about not only Japanese food culture but Korean food as well. Rice is at the core of both food cultures as they eat them every day throughout their lives. Here I have discussed practical knowledge on how to choose rice for different preferences and which rice we eat the most outside at the restaurants. I would like to discuss rice in much more depth later, but for the start, I hope we could first try rice after achieving this practical knowledge. You would taste the difference as much as you know about it.