[Sca-cooks] Partly OP: Brown vs. white rice?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:
>I tend to buy Thai Jasmine rice (although i notice a degradation in 
>quality over the past couple decades) or South Asian basmati rice 
>(and these are quite variable in quality). While Master Adamantius, 
>whose taste buds and nose i am certain are more finely and 
>sensitively attuned than my own, smells no difference between his 
>packages of Carolina and Jasmine rice, i notice a difference and to 
>me they smell different when cooked.

I don't recall saying that there was no difference, or that I smelled 
none. I believe I said that both had an aroma, and that Carolina was 
pleasant in its own way.

>  I was not prejudiced against American rices until after i returned 
>from Indonesia. On a few occasions, especially when financially 
>strapped, i purchased American rice, thinking there couldn't be a 
>big difference. However, upon cooking and eating it, i found i 
>really could taste and smell a difference.

I'm sure there is one, and when your personal preferences are attuned 
in a particular direction, they sometimes aren't met when a staple 
changes brands suddenly. But I question whether personal preference 
really has much to do with any kind of empirical quality standards. I 
think that, basically, you started out in life expecting "rice" to 
taste like American rice, and then moved outside of the US, where 
your expectations changed. When you returned to the US, rice just 
wasn't the same for you, but it was actually you that changed. My 
lady wife is also rather particular about her rice, but she's 
inclined, all other things being equal, to prefer American rice 
because of higher (yes, I can hear you all laughing) hygienic 
standards in American factories and warehouses than in most Chinese 
ones, if not elsewhere in Asia. I've noticed that Carolina (the 
brand, not the state of origin) seems to have slightly longer grains 
than some varieties, and fewer broken or blackened ones. In my area, 
Carolina seems a bit fresher, with fewer crumbly, powdery grains than 
the jasmine rice in the Asian groceries in my area, in spite of the 
fairly high turnover. It's less aromatic in the store, too, but 
transferring it from the sack or box to a tightly-sealed glass jar 
normally restores that fairly distinctive grain aroma.

Adamantius