Polished rice vs Unpolished rice

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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