If you're a bitch who buys unwashed rice just because it's easy, read this!

February 19, 2020

Tapioca is shaped like a black marble and has a soft, squishy texture.

In Singapore , this is a common drink sold at MRT kiosks, but it has recently become popular in Japan as well.

Is it similar to the nata de coco trend that was popular among high school girls wearing loose socks and playing with their pagers, or among older guys who loved to drink Emperor Yunker liquid ?

What is tapioca? Lonely tropical fish?

My dad, a member of the bubble generation, probably combines the feeling of the words with a Wink song and finds himself laughing along to it.

This is actually the starch of cassava, a potato native to Central and South America.

It is also imported in large quantities to Japan, where it is often used as a secondary ingredient in processed foods, and is found in frozen udon noodles, bread, instant ramen, etc.

In fact, it's used in even more unexpected places.

None of our customers prefer no-wash rice, but it is used when processing no-wash rice.

Regularly polished white rice has bits of bran on it that can only be seen under a microscope.

Rice polishing was a daily routine for Yukichi Fukuzawa. In his time, brown rice was pounded with a pestle and mortar, and the resulting white rice would have been visibly white with bran still remaining , like a wall with peeling paint .

Washing rice must have been a very difficult task in order to eat properly polished rice .

These days, the residue is so bad you can't see it without a microscope, so all you need to do is rinse it quickly two or three times.

By the way, since germ rice is rice that you eat the bran from, it's enough to just give it a quick rinse to remove the bran that has already come off.

If you find this rinsing process, which takes less than a minute, too much of a hassle and think it's a waste of water to shower for just five seconds, we recommend the slightly more expensive unwashed rice.

However, rinse-free rice was originally developed for commercial use, where 1 to 10 sho of rice had to be cooked at a time. It was apparently initially intended for hospital meals.

This will save hundreds of thousands of yen in water bills each year and reduce the effort required to wash rice by dozens of hours.

However, for households that only cook 1-3 cups of rice at a time, no-rinse rice is uneconomical. Those who prefer no-rinse rice probably choose it because it is "easy" and "economical. "

The white color of the rice washing water is mainly dissolved starch, not bran. Therefore, there is no need to wash the rice until it becomes transparent. This will only reduce the rice's energy value, and washing it until it becomes transparent will cause the rice to crack and lose its flavor.

I've digressed, but how do you use tapioca in the process of making no-wash rice?

Normally, tapioca is sprayed onto white rice and heated, causing the rice bran to adhere to the tapioca. When the rice is blown away, even the bran, which can only be seen under a microscope, is completely gone.

It's hard not to cry when talking about Project X, where Japanese engineers are amazed at how they managed to discover this effect in tapioca , but because this special rice polishing machine and tapioca are required, pre-washed rice is more expensive than regular white rice.

(The rice loses its flavor when it is heated, but the convenience of "no washing" is prioritized.)

As tapioca drinks have become popular in Japan and demand has increased, the price of tapioca used in pre-washed rice has risen.

Rice milling machine manufacturers are experiencing sluggish sales. Companies using these machines are facing increased milling costs. What's more, due to deflationary pressures, these costs cannot be added to the sales price.

"When the wind blows, the cooper makes money"

Now, in the midst of global causal relationships, unexpected facts and unexpected places can cause changes in corporate performance through a chain reaction of theories.

Thanks to panda-faced Tsai Ing-wen and her tapioca diplomacy, not panda diplomacy, the industry is in an uproar from top to bottom!

President Tsai Ing-wen treats Foreign Minister Kono to tapioca, sparking a buzz on social media! So, shares in Sa〇ke (a rice milling machine manufacturer) are a selling point!

Old men with reflexes like that are so cool, hey?

It's like being in Singapore.