This is one of those things I’ve always wondered about and I never really understood the difference, or whether we really even needed to wash rice.  So, I did a little poking around and this is what I learned.

First, there are a lot of opinions out there.  I know…shocker!  It seems as though the decision to wash or not to wash boils down to where the rice comes from.  If it comes from the U.S., then you apparently don’t need to wash the rice. This is because rice grains are normally milled to remove the outer husk and bran layers, leaving the translucent white grain that we are all familiar with. Brown rice has had the husk removed, but still has the nutritious bran layer attached.

Here, in the US, there is a law that obliges producers of milled, white rice to add nutrients back to the grains to make it as nutritious as brown rice. This means a dusty coating of vitamins and minerals is added to the rice before it is packaged and sold.  Hence, don’t wash your enriched white rice if  you want to keep those added nutrients.  Don’t worry though, if you do wash it, you basically end up with regular ole’ white rice, nothing wrong with that!

If your rice comes from Asia, like Jasmine rice, what that means is that the rice tends to not be artificially enriched.  It is simply milled white grains, and washing them should make no difference to the nutritional content of the grains. Essentially, you would rinse this rice to remove some of the starchy powder.  By rinsing these types of rice, you end up with rice that doesn’t stick together after cooking.  However, in the case of certain rices like Arborio rice (used for Risotto’s), you don’t want to wash the rice, because it’s that starch dust that creates the thick texture that we love about that dish. If your goal is to have sticky rice, then don’t wash it, that starch dust is good for stickiness.

As a general rule of thumb: American = Don’t Wash; Asian = Wash