Cooking rice is a time consuming affair, if you are using brown rice… and it gets worse if you are cooking GABA Brown Rice, like I like to do in my Zojirushi rice cooker. Here is the explanation from the Zojirushi website:
A: This is not a new variety of brown rice, but a newly different way of cooking brown rice to “activate” it and increase natural occurring gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), an amino acid in brown rice believed to have health giving properties such as lowering blood pressure, improving kidney function and relieving stress. The brown rice is “activated” by soaking it at 104°F for 2 hours before the actual cooking begins. This feature is available in select rice cookers (see the Rice Cooker
page).
The problem is that brown rice has a lot of nutrients and fiber, and GABA brown is even better, but rice also tends to have significant arsenic levels, and we might like to reduce that. Here is the basic problem and solution from Dr. Michael Greger:
In practice, We have several options.
- You can take any good brown rice, like a basmati, or hikari and parboil it for 5 minutes and then drain the water, and cook it as brown rice in your rice cooker. My favorite is the Zojirushi Induction heat models( I use this 3-cup Induction Heat model, for I have at most two people).
- If you want to make your own GABA rice, you could pre-soak it at about 100 Fahrenheit, for 15 minutes, drain the water, and then run it through the GABA Brown rice cycle in your rice cooker (3 hour cycle). If you have a larger family, and eat rice a lot, you could opt for a Induction Heat model like this one (5.5 cup, or this one 10 cup).
- Note that using the GABA cycle directly, you lose the benefit of the separate parboiling, and you are not washing out the arsenic. As suggested above, you should parboil it for five minutes, drain, and then cook it as normal brown rice. And, if you want to seriously shrink cooking time, you could use a Pressure Cook plus Induction Heat model, like these for 5.5 cups or 10 cups respectively.
- But there is another option, which saves you a lot of the hassle. Sun Valley Rice Company provides a parboiled Koshihikari-GABA rice, which means you can skip the whole parboiling and GABA sprouting cycle, for they did it for you. This rice you only need to soak for 30 minutes to rehydrate it, but then you can cook it as white rice, which is a lot faster than brown rice.
In short, There are many ways to get the job done. Sunvalley Rice was very helpful, and also brought to my attention the information about arsenic in rice, from the USA Rice Federation.
So you pay for convenience, whether it is in rice cooker tech, or in terms of farming out the prep work. It is up to you. But if rice is a part of your diet, the above options are worthwhile. Obviously, you can to it in a normal pan, and you can then cook it in plentiful water, drain it, and then steam it dry, like Cookie + Kate. Have it your way. Now you know your options.