【Reading】げんまい

【English Name】Brown Rice

Genmai (brown rice) refers to rice from which only the husk has been removed from the rice paddy grain, without undergoing milling/polishing. As the character "gen" indicates, it means "dark color," and because the bran and germ remain, it has a beige to pale-brown appearance.

It has many nutritional advantages compared to white rice; its energy value is about 353 kcal per 100 g. It is rich in vitamins and minerals such as vitamin B1 at 0.41 mg, magnesium at 110 mg, phosphorus at 290 mg, and dietary fiber at 3.0 g. In particular, it is widely recognized that the amount of vitamin B1 greatly exceeds that of white rice.

Tracing its history, in the Nara period, polished rice (also called shirage-mai) was something eaten by the upper classes, while ordinary people regularly ate rice with a lower degree of polishing. In the modern era, in 1920, the National Institute of Nutrition recommended seven-tenths-milled rice. In the early Showa period, the physician Kenzo Futaki advocated the healthful value of a brown-rice diet and devoted himself to making it widely known.

As for cooking, the result tends to come out hard in an ordinary household rice cooker, so the use of a pressure cooker or a model compatible with brown-rice cooking is desirable. Soaking should be done for at least 12 hours as a guideline, and the amount of water is appropriately about 1.6 to 2.2 times the rice, which greatly improves the mouthfeel. Hatsuga genmai (germinated brown rice), which has undergone a germination process, is characterized by being easy to handle even in a general rice cooker.

From the standpoint of storage, it is more advantageous than white rice; in contrast to white rice, which is prone to quality deterioration through oxidation after polishing, brown rice has the property that its quality is slow to decline over time because the bran layer protects the exterior.