Unpolished Brown rice....What’s the difference....?
Polished and unpolished rice do obviously differ in color,
appearance and aroma. The way paddy is processed (Milling) to get rice is the
primary differentiation. A paddy grain has 7 layers; Milling and polishing
removes up to 5 outermost layers of a rice grain, leaving only a core comprised
mostly of carbohydrates. The outermost ‘Bran layer’ after ‘husk/hull layer’ contains
essential fatty acids and very important nutrient such as thiamine, an
important component in mother’s milk. These nutrient rich outer layers have
numerous good fats and fibers that help to maintain intestinal
health, prevent cancer, fight obesity, and affect the probability of getting both heart disease and diabetes. Polished rice doesn't have any of these health
benefits.
Rice husk and Rice Bran are the usual
leftover by-products of milling and polishing. Powdered husk is a nutrient rich
food for cattle. And those Bran layers are being used to manufacture rice bran oil
J.
Each
unpolished brown rice grain has more than a polished white rice grain....
·
80% more vitamin B1
·
67% more vitamin B3
·
90% more vitamin B6
·
50% more Iron
·
50% more Manganese
·
50% more Phosphorus
· Fiber, Antioxidants and healthy fats
The practice of polishing rice had its origin in the
desire to improve its keeping quality, and the incidental whitening of the seeds,
nuts and grains led to the demand for white products. The aesthetic sense is
appealed to in greatest measure in this case by the products of lowest biologic
values.
Our
journey from Harvest to Market.....
This is our very first experience with milling
rice...may be many farmers went through this same journey. It took us more than
three months from paddy harvest to process rice, after all intense care to farm
a poison free food grain; we were adamant about processing rice to be a whole
grain without losing any health benefits of it. We started experimenting with
local rice mills and hand-pounding.
Rice mills around our field didn't have
the capability and awareness to perform only de-husking. One of the initial stages of rice milling is to pass paddy through sets of cylindrical steel
rollers for de-husking, Instead of de-husking only the outer hull of paddy these
steel rollers tend to remove the nutrient rich bran layers. We also learnt that
rubber rollers in place of steel rollers help retain nutrient rich layers with
rice grain. Mills which used rubber rollers instead of steel rollers are mostly
of automated plants and you can’t break stages of processing. You feed in the
paddy and get only polished rice as output.
On the other hand only a very few elderly known
hand-pounding, its logistics, and people didn't work out to be fruitful. Our
search ended with a distant location where we could just pass the paddy only through
a set of rubber rollers and there was an option to break the process and get
output at different stages; but the trick is rubber rollers are equipped to
de-husk only 20% of the fed paddy, so there is a need to re-route the output
through these rollers again and again, but with repetition; rice grain will
start to break off. The real challenge is to balance this, and we will still be
left with at least 10% of unprocessed paddy mixed with rice and an additional
step to separate them out. We did gladly succeed with a steep learning curve
and now we have our rice packed and ready to be sold direct to consumers.
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