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Rice: "Pure White and Sweetly Fragrant"
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Awfully complex for such a little grain.
Is any aroma as beguiling as that of freshly cooked rice?
Often at work, I’ll feel my senses overwhelmed with the cool but steamy, clean scent of freshly cooked rice. My co-worker Corey has just poured a batch of freshly boiled rice into a strainer and the aroma has taken over the kitchen.
I’ve been curious about the smell of rice for a while now, and finally sat down to do a little research. As it turns out, the aroma of rice is a complicated matter and scientists are still trying to sort it out. After looking through some of the obvious sources, the wonderful book “The Seductions of Rice” by Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid, for example, or “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee (both are titles worth seeking out), I was disappointed to find little on the makeup of rice’s aroma.
McGee describes the scent of standard white rices (and this is no small matter: he notes there are possibly 100,000 varieties of rice grown throughout the world) as having “green, mushroomy, cucumber-like, and ‘fatty’ components”. Scientists have been pursuing this topic for three decades in an effort to identify the factors that most affect the smell of rice, particularly the aromatic strains (think basmati and jasmine). Does milling or cooking or drying or age effect the aroma of the grain?
“A large number of compounds contribute to the aroma and flavor of rice,” researcher Elaine Champagne wrote in Rice Aroma and Flavor: A Literature Review. “However, of the >200 volatile compounds observed in rice, only a few have been identified as affecting the aroma and flavor of cooked rice.”
Such a simple grain, ah, but it isn’t. I like the idea there’s a little mystery with my rice, but I’ll be interested in seeing how this plays out.
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