(Iris has said my next book should have that title. I demurred but said it would work for a blog post. Here it is.)
I go through rice phases. For a while, nothing would do but Thai jasmine. Lately it’s been medium-grain japonica rice from California. Sometimes I get a hankering for basmati.
Thailand and India export a lot of rice, which is why you see bags of basmati and jasmine at Trader Joe’s and probably your local supermarket. Japan exports practically no rice. It’s a small country, and they eat all of their rice and then some. The rice you eat at your local sushi place, assuming your local sushi place is in Seattle rather than Japan, comes from California. Brands like Kokuho Rose, Nishiki, and Neko Neko do their best to look Japanese, but it’s all Californian.
Not that this is a bad thing. California produces some very fine products such as meyer lemons, Korean tacos, and Laurie.
On a recent trip to Uwajimaya, however, I noticed that they do, in fact, carry Japanese rice, in 1-kilo bags selling for $20 to $35. The packaging, naturally, is gorgeous. Hmm…rare, high price, pretty sack. I put out the word on Twitter: anyone tried this stuff?
Hsiao-Ching Chou responded:
> Spent waaaay too much money on rice from Japan. I thought the flavor would be transporting. No.
I trust Hsiao-Ching, but I didn’t say no when Jay Friedman of [Gastrolust](http://gastrolust.com/) gave me two cups of Koshihikari rice from Tochigi prefecture. Just saying the word “prefecture” is transporting, don’t you think?
I made a cup each of Nishiki from California and the koshihikari. On appearance, the koshihikari won: it’s aggressively milled pearls of rice, shorter grain than the Nishiki. But they tasted the same to me.
Janice Martin of [Tanuki](http://tanukipdx.com/) pointed me to this blog post about newly harvested fall rice in Japan. Maybe I’ll look for that. It sounds even more expensive!
I also tried one other rice, *haiga mai,* which is rice (Californian, in this case) milled until the bran is gone but the germ remains, so there’s a little brown spot at the end of each kernel. It’s been called “brown rice for people who don’t like brown rice.” Well, I’m certainly one of those people, but I didn’t like this stuff, either, although I could be cooking it wrong. It cooked up a little mushy and left a weird carpet-like layer on the bottom of the rice cooker.
To make a very long story short, then, if you like medium-grain rice, the basic California stuff is just fine.
