Brown and Red Jasmine Rice - Healthy and Tasty White Rice Substitutes
- Brown Jasmine rice 2 cups
- Red Jasmine cargo rice 1 cup (the ratio of brown rice to red rice here is arbitrary. You can choose your prefered ratio)
- The above or mixed Jasmine brown and red rice 3 cups
- Water 6 cups
Rice is the main source of carbohydrates for many cuisines, for example Chinese. We are told repeatedly that brown rice and multigrains are much better alternatives than white rice, but the reality is these alternatives are usually rejected by our family members either due to the texture or taste that they can never replace the fragrant white rice in some families. Brown rice is usually too hard and multi-grans rice usually comes out with uneven textures for the various grains, some too mooshy and some too hard. I discovered a brand of rice which is a mixture of Jasmine brown rice and Jasmine red rice. Jasmine rice has the natural aromatic fragrance which fills the room with a pleasant scent when cooked. The brown and red varieties of Jasmine rice have the health benefits of the whole grains that we like and taste just about as good as regular white rice.
Cook the mixture of brown and red Jasmine rice the same way you cook the white rice. Prepare to smell the great Jasmine aroma when it's cooked! My whole family loves these white rice substitutes. Ever since we discovered them, we have completely abandoned white rice. They are long grains and not as sticky as some varieties of regular white rice, great for making fried rice. Try it!
Epilogue - warning about a bad brand
Recently I had the misfortune of buying a brand of the mixed Brown and Red Rice, Parrot super fancy brown and red rice (bottom picture below), that totally threw me off my naive belief about all brands of the red and brown cargo rice being made equal. Not only that it did not have the fragrance while being cooked, the texture was hard and dry and not chewy alike the good brand rice no matter how much more water you put. It's as if the rice can never be cooked thoroughly. The rice looked just like the brown and red cargo rice from other good brands, but the grains seemed to be a little larger and longer with streaks parallel to the long side of the grain on the surface. These grains might have been harvested too late in the season that they got too old or the product might have just been on the shelf for too long. I bought it because the brand was much cheaper than say, the Wei-Quan Elephant God brand or the Three Fairies brand, and it was a total waste of my money. I couldn't stand it, so I gave all the Parrot brand rice I bought to our garden as fertilizer. Please do learn from my lesson and don't buy the Parrot brand of brown and red rice, or you will think that I lied to you about how good the two kinds of rice are.
