Have you had white rice with a little sugar?

Cafe Society
#41

I’m not a fan of rice pudding (like @dwyr I prefer my grains savory - I love oatmeal but no maple syrup, brown sugar, etc. touches it) but I’ll use a small amount of sugar in a savory rice dish where it enhances flavor. I make an Indian saffron-lemon rice that calls for a bit of sugar, and I’ll put a pinch of sugar into Indonesian-style fried rice.

As @Didi44 points out, the word “rice” covers a lot of territory. It’s about like saying “apples” - sure, it’s a useful term, and it does impart some general information, but it doesn’t give you details. A Granny Smith is nothing like a Delicious. A short-grained sticky rice is nothing like jasmine rice.

How you prepare it matters as well, even if you aren’t adding a bunch of other ingredients. The character is totally changed from no rinse to a little rinse to repeated rinsing, frying in a bit of oil before cooking, adding more or less water, cooking with or without salt, etc.

#42

There are Japanese and Chinese sayings, probably other Asian countries also, that every grain of rice is a drop of a sweat from a farmer’s brow or a tear from a farmer.

Growing up I was told not to leave a single grain of rice in the bowl because it takes a year grow each grain. It actually takes 3-6 months.

#43

A memory came back to me. My Dad, who grew up poor, told me that he would sometimes have leftover rice with milk and sugar as his morning cereal. He grew up on plantation in Kauai, Hawaii in the 30’s and even if breakfast cereals were available, it’s extremely unlikely his parents would buy it.

#44

Sugar and milk on rice sounds very low-rent, “gotta fill-em-up before payday”. I ate puffed rice cereal as a child, though, and rice krispies, and put a little sugar on that. Plain rice? eww, no.

#45

No, never tried it. I spruce up my rice by cooking it in a beef or chicken broth, butter, salt and sometimes crack an egg in it. Salt always wins over sugar for me.

#46

Hell yeah!

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#47

I buy a box of Rice Krispies a few times a year. They’re good.

#48

Don’t be silly. Sushi is a different thing with its own standards. It’s not about what it’s made of, it about what it is.

#49

Tried it for the first time today, turned out quite well. Normally I make rice with a variety of things like A1, BBQ sauce, soy sauce, tiki masala, butter, oil (not at the same time obviously) but simple rice & sugar is quite good.

#50

Just trying to figure out the rules. Sushi begins with white rice, then you add vinegar to it, so that’s OK. Simply sprinkling sugar onto white rice is not OK, unless say a century has passed and it’s been given a proper Japanese name?

#51

My Polish mother occasionally served cooled white rice with sugar, cream, and strawberries, in the height of summer as an easy dessert. The rice is a bland filler/vehicle, that’s all.

#52

My quondam Korean mother was served, in America, “Milk Toast”: white bread with sugar and milk. Which she thought was very bizarre when she first met it.