Pretreatment

Before being ready for cooking rice usually goes through different preliminary treatment. Initially rice seeds are stripped off the chaff, and the resulting product is called brown rice. Usually peeling continues until rice is stripped off both the bran and the germ, and thus remains white rice.

White rice can also be enriched by the addition of nutrients. The cheapest way for this is to add a dust cover (powder coating), which can be easily washed, hence sometimes enrichment is done by covering the grains with water-insoluble substance.

Rice is polished by manually or using special machines covering the grains with glucose, starch or talcum powder, and thus they acquire attractive shiny appearance.

In some regions, such as West Africa and parts of India, widely spread is the steamed rice, which is treated with steam while still in the form of brown rice. In this way the nutrients from the bran, mostly thiamin, are transferred to the inside of the grains. The process causes starch gelatinization in grains and they become not so fragile. After steaming rice is dried and is used directly or is further peeled, which makes its color yellow, and not white.

Rice ground into flour has different applications, such as production of drinks – amazake, rice wine. It is poor in fats, protein and cellulose, therefore it has dietary qualities. Rice flour contains no gluten, which is why it cannot be used for baking bread.