Rice Cooking
Even cooked rice made with aged grains can be soft, fluffy, and delicious!
Aged rice tends to be hard and lacks stickiness when cooked, but if it's cooked in easily-absorbed alkaline ionized water, it will properly take up water and the starch will gelatinize. Gelatinized starch is soft and sticky when chewed, and brings out the natural sweetness of the rice.
<Why does gelatinization make it so delicious?>
The hard starches found in rice are not edible, but when cooked with sufficient water, they gelatinize and turn paste-like.
When chewed, the amylase in saliva decomposes the soft, paste-like starch into sugars, resulting in a sweet taste.
Indicates a statistically significant difference based on a threshold of *5% and ***0.1%
When cooked with tap water, the boundary thought to be the cell wall clearly remains, but when cooked with alkaline ionized water, it disappears completely, allowing water to permeate.
Onishi, Rieko, Yasuo Hara, and Eiko Arai. 2001. "Improvement of Eating Quality and Preservability of Cooked Rice Obtained from Aged Rice Grains by Weak Electrolyzed Cathode Water." Nippon Shokuhin Kagaku Kogaku Kaishi 48 (2): 112–118.
Arai, Eiko. 2015. "Functional Water and Cooking Science." Meeting of the Japanese Society for Functional Water 14 (October 23).
