Answer One. Whole grains are hard on the system.

Today we don’t eat many grains or grain dishes. They are just one element in the diet along with fats, sugars, vegetables, fruits, meats and fish. The recommended amount in the US is six ounces for a 2000 calorie a day diet.

In the past people ate huge amounts of grains.  Wheat bread provided 40% of the calories of Americans, almost certainly the most lavishly fed population ever in the history of the world, as late as World War II.  Through most of history, farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of us would have been) probably consumed between  70% and 90% of  their calories in the form of bread, porridge, or other grain dishes.

That means between one and two pounds of bread a day, or one to two average loaves of sliced white bread, between three and six times as much as we eat.

One pound of white bread

Except that these were whole grains. Only half the British could afford white bread in 1800.  It was 1900 before the whole population could afford it. And Britain was the earliest European country to go over to white bread.  They were chewing or swallowing their way through one to two pounds of oatmeal, oatcakes, barley bannocks, rye bread, or some mixture of grains and beans every day.

Without a bit of butter, jam, olive oil, or lard to lubricate the grains, chewing and swallowing are laborious.

Worse, digesting such a lot of whole grains is a difficult, energy-consuming business ( we spend about 10% of our energy intake on digesting).  Because of this whole grains  pass through the system quickly.  The laxative effect of a small serving of whole grains is great for us sedentary modern urbanites. For manual workers the laxative effect of a couple of pounds of whole grains was a pain.

Those who could afford them, therefore preferred processed grains with more of the bran removed. It’s even possible that they yielded more calories, perhaps even more nutrition, per unit weight because they were easier to digest.

Answer Two: Our Ancestors Thought Processed Food was More Natural and More Healthful

We tend to think of cooking as messing up.  We want fresh, natural foods that taste of themselves.  We like lightly cooked green beans, rare steaks, and the US government tells us whole grains are better for us than white bread, cakes, and pie crusts.

For most of history, the majority view was the exact opposite.  Raw meat, vegetables, whole grains were just the raw materials.  they had to be processed and cooked to get at their natural, healthful essence.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but eating whole grains was regarded a bit as we might regard eating oysters, shell and all.  We just don’t do that. We process the oyster (shell it) to get at its real briny oysteriness inside. Our ancestors thought about grains the same way.  They had to be processed to get rid of the husks, hulls, and bran and get at the pure white inside part.  The outside parts, like oyster shells, were impossible to chew, caught in the throat, and were thus not natural (in the sense of being the grain itself) and not healthful either.  And of course we still don’t eat the husks either. Or put another way. There is not a sharp distinction between processed and whole grain. It’s a question of where you stop taking off the inedible layers or the germ.

In short, in the past most people thought of processing and cooking as perfecting the rough and contaminated raw materials that were harvested or slaughtered.  Only in the past century have we done a complete about-face, coming to believe that processed grains (or sugar, for example) are neither natural nor healthful.

___________

Thanks to Maria Speck for the question that prompted this post. There are still things about grains that Maria can’t figure out.  A couple of weeks ago she sent me an email.  “What about the ‘white food’ preference of earlier humans?  After years of researching whole grains, that’s the  one question that I can only partially answer to this day,” adding that she didn’t think it could be just status or the power of big corporations.  What’s above is my answer to her question.

The first time I met Maria Speck she was already on a whole grain mission. “They’re delicious,” she said, waving her cup perilously to emphasize her point. “It’s just a lucky coincidence that they’re healthy as well.”

Now several years after our chat in the coffee shop in the cavernous atrium of a New Orleans hotel, she’s published her Ancient Grains for Modern Meals to great acclaim, as you will see if you follow the link.  I’ve been reading it, thoroughly enjoying Maria’s essays about her appealing philosophy of cooking and eating, and thoroughly frustrated that so few whole grains are available in Mexico.  Roll on January and a trip to the States so that I can get my hands on some grains.

He approached me after a session on the Afro-Antillean cuisine to be found in Panamá.

Pastry chef Lastino Apochito

He was, he said, worried that his people, the Embera, were losing their traditional culture, their dances, their clothing, and most of all their cuisine.  They played their music in hotels but not in the community.  Would it not be possible to save the cuisine if it were made accessible to tourists?  Would it not be possible to refine the dishes to make them appealing to a wider audience?

I had to tell him that this was really far outside my area of expertise but that I would love to know more about the cuisine of the Embera and about his own story. So we settled down on some hard chairs in the entrance to the exhibition hall where I struggled to take notes as the band that was circulating inside played under the echoing corrugated iron roof.

Lastino Apochito’s story

And how did Lastino Apochito come to be a pastry chef and instructor in Panama City?

He came, he told me, from a settlement of twenty to forty houses, small straw houses with a balsa frame, thatched with bihoy and then covered with rice straw, set in the mountains and rivers of the Darien peninsula, a place that echoes back to my childhood.

“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

As Robin Hanbury-Tenison explains here, Keats got it wrong.  It was Balboa, not Cortez, who stared at the Pacific.  And Darien remains a wild area, the one uncompleted section of the pan-American highway.

Lastino’s family was very poor so he left home at 15 to make his own way in the world. He was taken in by an uncle in the big city.  A friend encouraged him to learn to make sweets, both national and international.  In the mid 1980s, there were no culinary schools in the city so he learn the old-fashioned way by working in hotels, often with professional European chefs until he had mastered pastry making and bread making.

Bollos and tamales of rice, maize and cooking bananas: Embera cuisine

The Embera’s basic crops were a varietiey of kinds of rice and maize, as well as bananas and sugar cane.  The rice, for example, might be three-month rice, silver rice, purple rice, or garrapatitatas (which I would roughly translate as little clawed feet rice).

Varieties of rice and maize from the Darien Peninsula

This selection of rice and maize came from an exhibit at Panamá Gastronómica.  I asked lots of people where the rice came from, from Asia in the east or Africa or the Mediterranean in the west but no one had an answer.

The rice was hulled by pounding it in a large pilón (a section of tree trunk hollowed out). This was women’s work (why is that not a surprise?) with one to three women doing the hard labor.  Then it or the maize were ground on a standard simple grindstone.  The meal was mixed with water, wrapped in the leaf of the nahuala palm (Carludovica palmata) from which Panama hats are made (these are not really Panamanian but Ecuadorian as everyone in Panamá hastens to tell you), and steamed.  This made a bollo, a dumpling essentially, a dish found in, say, Columbia as well.

A number of variants were available.  The maize could be made into tamales stuffed with fish or chicken (quite how these differed from bollos I was not exactly sure). Green bananas could also be grated and made into tamales. The rice could be cooked with chicken and bananas.  Or for sweets, the banana or the purple rice could be cooked with cane sugar.  The cane sugar itself was extracted with a trapiche, a contraption with two vertical rollers that was invented in the mid seventeeth century in Asia or in the Americas, no one knows, but that spread like wildfire.

The Embera extracted oil from a couple of palms (one of them the Coroso, the other I didn’t catch but it was believed to have commercial potential) and from squash seeds.  The fruits of palm were pounded , cooked, and then the oil was collected from the top.

For meat, the Embera had chicken, they fished in the rivers, and they hunted deer, rabbit, birds (including toucans), iguanas, peccaries, and monkeys in the forest.  It was preserved by cutting into strips, salting with sea salt, perhaps seasoned with ginger, and smoked.  As I understood it, this kept for several days even in the tropical rainforest.

And for feasts. Pork!

And all the while as I am trying to get this down, the band plays on, and I am wishing, wishing I had a couple of extra days in Panamá to go and see all the things Lastino is describing.

 My thoughts on Embera cuisine

Clearly over the centuries there has been a lot of interchange between the Embera people and both the African and the Spanish populations of Panamá since many of the implements (the trapiche or sugar mill for example, and the pilón), the ingredients (rice, maize, banana, sugar), and the dishes (bollos and tamales and arroz con pollo) have considerable overlap.  But how has that happened and who has contributed what?  Is there even enough evidence to work it out.  The history of the cuisines of the lowland American tropics is just waiting for scholars to tackle.

Culinary tourism in Embera country

Just google Embera and you will find that in fact tourism is already under way. Here is one link and another. In fact, there is a burgeoning Embera tourist industry now as you will find if you google. Here is the program for the National Association of Interpretation (never knew there was such a thing) annual meeting in Panama. Its aim “is to inspire leadership and excellence to advance heritage inter- pretation as a profession”  by forging “emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meanings inherent in the resource.”

NAI_IC2011_program

I’m not sure how I feel about this kind of tourism.  I can see arguments on both sides.  I find the “let’s go and live with people in loin clothes” cringe-making and worthy of 1950s National Geographic.  Against that, the Embera need to live.  Any thoughts, readerss?

Scientists are there too. Here’s a picture of the plants of ethnobotanical interest from the Darien peninsula from a presentation by Kate Kirby of the University of British Columbia.

Celebremos_Poster

Then Uma Satyavolu sent these memories of pootarekulu, as these sheets are called.  Not so much on how they are made because that’s a professional job.  More on how they are layered with ghee and powdered sugar for events at the time of weddings and of imminent birth.   Thanks, Uma, for such fascinating background.  I specially love the idea of steel drums full of these paper thin sheets.

Update.  Uma has asked me to post this update.

Rachel:

I’ve made a few small but significant changes! Could you please, please post this instead of the other version?

Also, I’ve often wondered about the similarity between Ethiopean/Eritrean injera and appam/attu/dosa: fermented batter cooked on a griddle and eaten with stew/sauce. So the Eritrean rice-pastry connection is interesting. But the odd thing is that pootarekulu are fairly specific as a culinary and culturalphenomenon; they are not even that well-known in the next district over. Or if they are, they are only so as an idiosyncratic taste.  It would have to be a fairly isolated trade-route for such a selective and isolated transfer of technology.

Regards,

Uma

My parents were both from the Godavari districts (East and West). So although I grew up in Hyderabad (the Big City which is in the Telangana region of the state), and always considered myself not very Andhra,  it’s been one of those things that is quintessentially “Home.”

Pootarekulu are literally, “smeared sheets” because they are made by smearing rice paste on hot surfaces (as the video you posted shows) and are bought as rice sheets and assembled at home.

They are popular throughout the Godavari region, but most prized in “Konaseema”-the Corner island part of East Godavari. When my mother used to call in the vendor who cried ‘pootarekulu” in the outskirts of Hyderabad, it was always a treat.

I remember the time my mother said, “Oh, please, we are from the Godavari (region),” (meaning, you shouldn’t try to quote high prices, as we know what they usually cost). The man selling the sheets from the woven basket (about 3 feet in circumference) which he transported on the back of a bicycle said: “Of course, you’re from the Godavari; if you weren’t, you’d be asking me if they were sheets/leaves to hang from the doorways!”

You buy the sheets from people who make them-they are, as far as I know, never made at home in normal households–by the hundred. They look like translucent foolscap paper sheets, and the women of the household assemble them for special occasions. This is especially true of the bride’s going away after the wedding, and for seemantam (baby shower-like ceremonies usually held in the seventh month of pregnancy).

Pootarekulu (along with chalimidi, ariselu, and sunni-undalu) are traditional sweets that are sent with the bride to the in-laws when she leaves her home after the wedding.  Huge amounts (big steel-drums full of them) arrive at the new in-laws’ home. They then  send the sweets round to friends, neighbours, and relatives to announce that their new daughter-in-law has arrived.  Pootarekulu are usually eaten as a tiffin/tiffen (snack)-with afternoon coffee or tea.

I used the phyllo dough analogy because, essentially, it is assembled like baklava: lay down a sheet, dampen with a clean, slightly wet cloth, brush liberally with molten ghee (clarified butter), and sprinkle liberally and evenly with powdered sugar. Then lay another sheet on top, and repeat. The process is tricky for a beginner, because if the towel is too wet, the sheet turns to starch and sticks to the towel.

Unlike baklava, after six or seven layers, it is folded into a neat packet using more ghee and wet-cloth application to keep it all moist and compact. The ghee then solidifies with the powdered sugar, and gives it a very disticntive taste and mouth-feel.

Its flavour is entirely dependent upon the quality (and, to be fair, quantity) of ghee. Without enough ghee, it can be papery and flaky, and that’s one thing good pootarekulu cannot be.

I’ve lived away from India for twenty years now, and the last time I went to Andhra Pradesh, it was being sold in sweets shops and even some supermarkets, which was not the case when I left, so that’s a good thing, I think.
I could go on on about it because it is bound up with my nostalgia  for the Godavari country, which is very fertile, and green with paddy fields and coconut trees and canals and temples. So I will refrain.

Thanks for the pleasure of thinking about pootarekulu: I miss them more as time passes. Sadly my American-born, non-Andhra, non-Indian husband did not take to the pootarekulu as well as he did to most other things Andhra, including Gongura, a relative of the hemp-leaf, and also an iconically Andhra food.

More food for thought. Another round up soon.  And many thanks, Uma.

ca. 540 AD.  Recipe (not direct translation).  Take refined rice glutinous rice starch, add enough water to make a batter, heat a large pot of boiling water, set a copper pan in the water, push the pan to rotate it as you drop in a ladle of batter. The batter spreads to cover the whole pan (centrifugal force).  Take the pan out of the water and peel off the film. It looks like suckling pig skin (cooked pig skin I assume).

Cut up and add to a savory soup or sweet sesame or fruit based soup.

Commentator Huang´s note.

Modern versions are still seen in the cuisine of Fukien. In the Foochow areas there is a much beloved dish called ting-pien hu which is made by spreading a thin layer of rice flour batter along the uypper wall of a large cooking wok. As the film dries it is scraped and allowed to fall into the hot savory soup in the center of the wok.

In southern Fukien thin round rice pancake called po ping are made on a flat bottomed pan.  These are used to wrap chopped meat and vegetables to give spring rolls.  When fried they are just like the ubiquitous egg rolls one sees in Chinese restaurants in America except than the skins are thinner than those made with wheat flour. In

In short, I finally  did what I should have done earlier on, looked up thin pastries in H.T. Huang´s wonderous volume in Joseph Needham´s Science and Civilization in China.  Huang, born and raised in China,worked as a food scientist for years in the US, ending up as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, before writing this tome on Fermentation and Food Science in China.  Never has a tome been more welcome.

He has a long discussion on ping or roughly Chinese pasta (Katy, I am following his terminology here which is why I use ping not bing.  He uses it to describe the earlier wider meaning of the word, whereas as your links point out in modern times it refers mainly to round breads).

No less that 15 kinds of ping were described in the 6th century Chhi Min Yao Shu, Essential Arts for the People´s Welfare, an astonishing compendium of agricultural practices and food technology.  The one above is the only batter.

Comments, please, please. Just love these hunts.  Thanks Charles, Katy and Robyn for comments here and on Facebook about the Chinese thin pastries, and everyone else on those elsewhere.  I will acknowledge them in future posts.

Here’s a quick, first shot at a summary.

1.  I change to griddle-baked instead of seared, thanks to Robyn Eckhardt’s comments.

2.  There is a huge world of these very thin pastries that deserves to be better known.  Very roughly they correspond to the world of Islam, including South India (though perhaps not northern Mughal India),  Southeast Asia and possibly Horn of Africa.

3. The thin pastries seem to have been used either in tharid, the signature meat and bread dish of Islam (though surely at the upmarket end) or as pie casings or wrappers for savories or sweets (Charles Perry, Anissa Helou, Susan Ji-Young Park, Ammini Ramachandran et al).

4. They are put on the heated surface in a variety of ways:

By spreading a handful of pretty liquid dough

By tapping the dough on with the hand or a spoon

By spreading a thin batter

By flipping the liquid dough on with a cloth

By using a brush to spread the dough on (Adam Balic is one who speculates this is modern)

5.  The heated surface may be a metal griddle (the commonest now, it seems), an upturned pot (I’m going to take the liberty of adding a photo that Paula Wolfert–I’ll take it down immediately if you have worries, Paula–sent Adam Balic in response to his forwarding Ammini’s video which, like the one in Ammini’s post, is black), or perhaps just stones.

6.  That the technique is a tricky one, that it could have been spread by the migration of just a few skilled cooks.

7.  That to make these pastries, you have to have either fine white flour or fine rice flour (missed that before, sorry).  Prior to the end of the nineteenth century, these were reserved for the elite.  Then new milling techniques made both much more widely available.

Note that I am assuming that all these techniques belong to a single family.  In spite of Katy’s plea, I see no reason (with possible exception below) to think they were independent inventions.  And for Nancy, who wonders why I talk about recent invention in relation to spring rolls wrappers, well, I’ve decided my default position is to assume something is recent until it is proven to be ancient.

Up for grabs.

1.  When these doughs were invented.  I’d now guess not before the (say) 9th or 10th century with the flowering of Islamic cuisine (pity we don’t know more about Sassanid).  Quite likely, as Charles Perry says, “as part of the madness for the thinnest possible bread in medieval Moorish Spain and North Africa.”  Certainly still there in Ottoman times.  (By the way, Charles, I think Gene Anderson dates Chinese dumplings too late.  I think they were there by the beginning of the CE).

2.  What the connections, if any, with China are.  Robyn Eckhardt believes the Chinese version of this pastry comes from Fujian (right, Robyn?)  Agreed that there was massive Chinese migration from their and Canton to Southeast Asia.  But do we have any evidence about the history of these pastries in South China?  Or their connection, if any, with ping.

Finally, I find it interesting to compare this with the history of oven baked pastries in Europe (raised crust, short crust, puff pastry, etc. etc).  All these depend on both fat and ovens.

The griddle baked pastries perhaps shouldn’t even be called pastries, if the European sense of pastries using fat is the norm.  They are a dry pasta or bread.

I’m probably the last person in the world to see Hokusai’s wave in waving rice (duh), since these kinds of stories fly round the web in a moment.  But if you are another laggard, click on this link which is one of the more informative one, or just google “Inakadate” or “rice field art in Japan.”  Quite amazing.

And to give a bit of historical perspective on rice in Japanese culture, here’s a classic from Princeton University Press:

Thanks to Ana Alfaro for the tip.

On the culinary front, I found it interesting that nineteenth century observers commented that woks were valued for boiling rice because, being thin, they heated quickly.   Rice not the stir fries that we tend to concentrate on.  Worth mulling over.  Also that the British tried to get into the market but could not make a pot that was thin enough.

Afterword.  An apology to Donald Wagner for originally posting his page. In the nicest possible way he asked me to just put a link so that no permissions were abrogated and his design remained clean.  And thanks again to him for keeping me posted on this work in the first place.

Second, several people have said they would like this book to add to their collection.  I’d be happy to take orders and send them.  The book is cheap, about $7 US for 160 pages nicely produced paperback, the mailing is not, probably at least $20 US unless you want to wait until I am in the States in January 2010.  But let me know and I will be happy to round up copies.  In Mexico you grab books when they appear.

Now to the recipes.

The author gives no indication of who gave her the recipe, whether this was a dish for a special occasion or everyday,  and certainly makes no effort to place them in context of the other cuisines of Africans in the Americas.

There are a hundred recipes, divided into maize, beans, pork, barbacoa, beef, deer, moles (no not the animal, the style of dish), iguana, tamales, fish and shellfish, pozoles, drinks, bread, sweets, postres, and various.

I started listing them all. I’ve given up.  Their names will mean nothing to many readers even when translated and be misleading to others (totopos are made of a mixture of nixtamal and lard, for example).

They are highly regional versions of Mexican standards, stamped by the poverty of the region, the climate of the region, and the abundance of fish given that these communities live on the coast.  There is more hunted meat than you would normally find: deer, rabbit, squirrel (under iguana), turtle eggs, armadillo.  The moles, pipianes, etc are simple with few spices.

I perked up at frijol con arroz but this is not a hoppin john type recipe.  Here it is.

You put the 1/2 kilo of beans on to boil without salt, when they are soft you add salt to taste, then you put on the fire a clay pot with 2 big tablespoons of lard and onion cut in rounds, when that is golden, you take the pot off the fire and add the beans without their broth, you let them season for about 15 minutes and then you crush them and you add broth to the required thickness [refried beans, essentially].  Put on the fire a pot with three times as much water as 1/2 kilo of rice.  When it is hot, add the rice, stir it, and let it cook on a slow fire.

Serve with pickled chiles and dry cheese.

This is a pretty liquid boiled rice, if the measurements are to be believed, with refried beans.

It’s interesting to see that Venezuelan chicha is what Mexicans would call horchata and not the various kinds of maize chicha found in other parts of Central and South America.

The ubiquity and variety of drinks called horchata leads one has to conclude that the Spanish were really homesick for their horchata when they arrived in the Americas. I would have thought that there would have been places where chufa would grow. Perhaps not. Another little mystery.

Anyway, over to Mariana.

“In Venezuela, horchata is a traditional beverage, along with Chicha which is more popular (there are several versions of chicha, but the most common is chicha de arroz, made with rice or rice flour, milk, sugar and seasoned with cinnamon).

I live in Maracaibo, a large city, and I remember that being a child, my mother took us to a famous place to have “cepillados” (shaved ice cones), and there also they sold chicha and horchata, this last being sold only in few places. My mother always asked for horchata. I tasted it, but since the flavor is a little bitter, I didn’t like it.

As a grown up, and as with coffee, I learned to appreciate its flavor and now I really love its fragance and untuosity and find it very refreshing in our very hot wheather. Happily, nowadays’ boom of “light” and “healthy” food has made horchata to be popularized, so there are many street vendors who sell “integral” (whole) food (like whole-wheat pastry empanadas), who are offering horchata among other “natural” beverages. (by the way, this is a very recent trend in street-food vending in Maracaibo).

HORCHATA RECIPE (not really sure about proportions because we use to make it “al ojo por ciento”. I can get exact proportions for you afterwards. Anyway it’s a matter of taste. If you prefer a stronger flavor, add more sesame seeds or less water)

1/2 cup of sesame seeds
1.5 lt. of water
sugar or raw cane sugar (in Venezuela we call it “papelón” or “panela” is like the “piloncillo”) at taste.

If using papelón, you can either grind it by hand, “shave” it with a knife, or you can make a syrup by placing it in a pan (of a size just to fit the papelón), adding water just until covering it, and placin it in low heat until the papelón melts.

Slightly toast the sesame seeds, allow to cool
Put the seeds in a blender with a small quantity (1 cup or so) of water. High-speed grind them.
Add the rest of the water and the sweet.
straw it fith a fine straw or a cloth. press to get all the liquid possible
serve cold

(The remaining pulp can be added to breads, pancakes or arepas, it’s a great source of fiber and protein).”

I’m beginning here because although horchata is one of my favorite agua frescas, it’s not one I ever seem to make really well at home. So I thought I’d try four different versions. Here are the results.

From left to right:

1. An horchata made with boiled rice

2. An horchata made with soaked raw rice, the commonest method I believe

3. An horchata made with rice flour

4. An horchata made with a commercial mix

To make the first horchata of boiled rice, I used the recipe in Melissa Guerra’s wonderful book Dishes from the Wild Horse Dessert. Melissa’s family and her husband’s too have ranched along the Rio Grande for centuries, they have family ties both sides of the border, are bilingual, and they know and love their culinary traditions.

For 2 quarts of horchata, Melissa suggests boiling 1/2 cup rice and a stick of cinnamon for half an hour in 2 quarts water.

Remove the cinnamon stick and blend adding extra water to make up for what has boiled away, and then add sugar to taste (between 1/2 and a full cup).

To make the second horchata of soaked rice, I took the recipe from Josefina Velázquez de Leon‘s Cocina Oaxaqueña (1984). Josefina Velázquez, as many of you may know, is worth of a post all on her own. From a distinguished family and widowed after a year of marriage, from the 1940s, she taught Mexican cooking to young ladies and published literally dozens of cookbooks under her own imprint. They remain a fundamental resource for Mexican cuisine.

For quart, she suggest soaking 1/4 lb of rice overnight, blending it with a small strip of cinnamon, sieving it through a cloth, and adding half a pound of sugar.

Here’s the soaked rice in the blender.

And here it is whirling away.

To make the third of ground rice, I followed the instructions on a box of rice flour that suggested blending a cup of milk with a tablespoon of rice flour and cinnamon and then adding water to make a liter.

Here is the happy illustration.

Finally for the fourth, I just used a commercial mix, adding one part of the mix to six parts of water and stirring. It took a few seconds to get the thick mixture of sugar, rice, cinnamon, and vanilla to blend with the water.

Results

The horchata made with commercial mix tasted fairly strongly of vanilla. If you like vanilla, you might find this satisfactory but it’s not my favorite flavor. The horchata made with ground rice was a lovely white color but that was due to the milk because the rice did not stay suspended in the mix at all. It tasted strongly of milk. Again perhaps fine if you like drinking milk.

The soaked rice produced as it always does a horchata that tended to separate and that needed to be stirred. When stirred it is an appealing white color and has a faint chalky taste and texture which I happen to find appealing.

The boiled rice also tended to separate and was more greyish than bright white. It tasted good though and I would happily alternate these last two methods.