Last night I was making rice and as soon as I poured water into the pot, I noticed some tiny dark beetles float to the top. This phenomenon isn’t at all surprising, but I felt bad. Because I now knew that I was going to wash these suckers out and flush them down the drain. They would probably all die out once I washed the dishes and sent dish soap coursing through the pipes. So much for generating good karma!
For North American residents, the two bugs you’re most likely to encounter in rice are the saw-toothed grain beetle (Oryzaephilus surinamensis, last night’s guest) and the rice weevil (Sitophilus oryzae). I searched for “rice bugs” to see how other people reacted to them, and found many American sites filled with: “THROW IT OUT! THROW IT OUT!” I hate to break it to you, but these suckers (and their larvae) are probably in your rice whether you see them or not. There are a number of traditional and handy tricks that people have used to get the bugs out before cooking the rice.
My least favorite method is picking them out by hand. Too labor intensive for me, but I’ve seen others do it! Spread the rice and sift through it one centimeter at a time. A variant on this method is to sieve them out. Pour the rice into a sieve and simply shake it around and watch the critters drop out through the bottom. If you want something more efficient, but potentially less bug friendly, you can do what I did last night: wash them out. They tend to float, so I’ll simply fill the rice pot with ample quantities of water, and three or four washes was good enough for me. There’s yet another option, my honest favorite, but not much of an option at 9:30 at night. You can pour the rice into a flat pan and leave it out in the sun. The rice bugs will walk/jump/fly right out.
In most cases, the larvae (and the bugs too small for you to see and/or those embedded in the rice grains) will still be swimming around with the rice once you set it on the stove or in your rice cooker. But due to the magic of heat, they will all be boiled to death and provide you with a marginal protein supplement for the day.
Of course, many Westerners (all races included) won’t notice the bugs in their rice, if they’re there at all. Should you encounter the problem of bugs crawling all over your rice grains, now you know what to do. You don’t have to throw out 2 lbs of rice and stay on the line for hours with the FDA. Of the bug-removing methods given above, the last option is perhaps both the least lethal option and also the least labor intensive.
Naturally, throwing your rice out will probably also spare the bugs a tragic, soapy death. One way or another, you choose your karma. Bon appétit!
arunlikhati
John
Oz
kudos
Hi Arun.
That is what our rice looks like everyday!
On one particularly dark morning, we foreign monks were eating by candlelight, when the Cambodian monk came a bit late. He was staring at his rice trying to determine what all the little dark specs were, then made the comment “khao sai prik thai” (we foreign monk’s common language is Thai, oddly; this means “black pepper rice”). Moving the candle closer, he could see it was literally hundreds of these weevils!
Here in Myanmar, one just gets used to it and either removes them or eats them. (they are dead by the time the monks get them, but I believe the rice must go through some sort of washing process first, they just can’t get them all)
We rinse our rice as well as dal and beans. Whenever we try to spread it on the roof to dry in the sun the monkeys show up and throw it all over the place! Sometimes we have to pick the small stones out of it and that’s usually by hand.
Many years ago a Vietnamese friend in the U.S. taught me to wash rice before cooking. I said it would wash away the nutrients. He made a face that said, “You are so wrong,” and said (out loud), “No, wash away the bugs!”
There are no bugs in our rice, I told him (confident in my Western modernity).
“Some bugs are very small. You can’t see them,” he said. “You don’t wash rice, you eat bugs.”
So yeah, I still thought HE was wrong, but I washed the rice to make him happy. And then one day, years later, I opened a sealed glass jar of rice and found — you guessed it — BUGS.
I mentioned this to my wife whose Japanese and she was puzzled. She’s never heard of these bugs, but we checked the rice we buy here in Ireland and didn’t find them. The ones we get are vacuum sealed, so if there were bugs, they’re gone now.
She doesn’t remember seeing them in Japan either, so they might remove them somehow ahead of time, or it’s how they preserve the rice. She thought that rice that’s more fresh might be more likely to have them, but I vaguely recall how Japanese rice gets freeze-dried or something while in storage. That might make the difference. Who knows. :-/
@Ashin Sopāka: Wow. I can only imagine how many bugs were in the “black pepper rice” before it was washed! (Although I have seen rice with hundreds of bugs crawling out of it before.)
@NellaLou: Admittedly, I too almost always wash.
@zensquared: From when I was young, I was always told we washed rice to keep it from boiling over in the pot. (I finally bought my parents a rice cooker back on their 31st anniversary.)
@Doug: Bugs are usually absent in the rice I buy, except for certain varieties. Fresher rice typically means fewer bugs. Leaving it on the shelf for a good length of time increases the likelihood of bugs crawling out. That said, I’ve bought many a 50lb bag of jasmine rice (which takes a long time to eat through) without ever seeing one of our friends of miniscule stature trudge through the grains. Maybe it’s the pesticides
I just opened an old bag of brown rice for an afternoon snack and upon boiling the water I saw the bugs! I then saw them crawling around the bag. I ended up taking the bag outside to the dumpster. I have been looking up what type of bug these were for the past hour and the picture shown here is deffinately them. I have never really heard of these bugs being in rice. Oh well.
@Jeremy: Make sure they aren’t in other foods too. These bugs are carboholics, often finding their way into flour, grains, starches (corn/potato/tapioca/…), and even other foods like salt! I would segregate those foods from your pantry, check them out and chuck them if necessary.
arunlikhati, thanks for the info. I didnt want to throw away my brown rice/bean mix so I simply washed it like you said. I have never experienced this with white rice but I will pay more attention from now on.