The grain of the rice provides food for migratory waterfowl and a number of other birds and animals. Wild rice plants can grow to be 10 feet tall. The U. Wild rice grows in streams, river, or lakes. They prefer shallow water with a slow current and muddy substrate.
Wild rice is an annual plant that cross-pollinates, meaning the male and female flowers are separate and pollen must be transferred from one to the other.
The female flowers on a cluster usually emerge before the males and are then pollinated by the male flowers from other clusters. Wild rice species continue to suffer from habitat loss. The Texas species Zizania texana is listed as endangered and is at risk of extinction.
It is sensitive to sulfite runoff from mining and wastewater treatment plants. Many of the California paddies are located downstream from former gold mines that used mercury to retrieve the precious metal. Naturally occurring bacteria act on the residual mercury, creating bio-toxic methylmercury.
The flooding of California fields causes these bacteria to proliferate, raising methylmercury levels in the rice. While the levels are considered toxic to wildlife, no studies have been done to evaluate the impact on human health. Lack of water is also a concern. In California, as climate change causes more and worse droughts, the huge rice industry there is under threat of running out of water.
An additional threat to lake rice is genetic drift, the cross-pollination of the DNA of cultivated varieties with native plants. Minnesota is home to around sixty thousand acres of wild rice waters that are bordered by twenty thousand acres of cultivated rice. Native American harvesters fear that their indigenous grasses will be contaminated by air-borne pollen or seed transported by water fowl, forever altering their ancestral heritage.
Lake rice is harvested over a several week span that begins sometime in late August or early September, depending on when the grains are ripe. Cultivated rice ripens all at the same time in the late summer to early fall. Wild rice is no easy crop to grow. The traditional Native American harvesting technique is to harvest the rice by canoe. Two harvesters man the boat: one person steers the canoe under the tall reed-like grasses while the other harvester uses a pole to bend the grass over the boat and thrash it with a stick to release the grass seeds into the bottom of the canoe.
Truly wild rice ripens unevenly so several passes must be made over the same area during the harvest season to gather all of the available grain. The toasting rice in the barrel exhaled humidity in quick, short bursts. Among local wood-parched wild-rice processors, their shed is the cathedral. A year-old engine pulled from a Ford Model A powers the huge barrel that spins over the wood fire.
A cylinder painted sky blue houses a flywheel of soft paddles engineered to gently knock off the loosened hulls. And now Aaron has a new baby: a giant mechanical separator. It gyrated in the middle of the room, its screen plate shaking the good, beautiful finished rice to one end and the broken, undesirable rice to the other.
Three generations of parchers, and they all judge doneness differently. My grandpa, he could see the doneness in the smoke, in the blue haze coming off the hot barrel. Me, I have a laser. And I taste it. He shot the laser into the rice to test temperature, then dipped a broom into the barrel, vigorously rubbed some loose kernels between his hands, and threw the rice into his mouth.
Like most parchers, he can taste which body of water the rice came from. The little kernels take on more of the smoke.
Aaron is white but has a complicated interface with Native culture common in the area. He parches rice very differently from Logan Cloud, but they have some things in common: a desire to protect the genetic diversity of local rice, and a hatred for paddy rice—and for sand. Sand that gets in the rice, whether in the canoe or in the parching shed, is the enemy.
Every chance he gets, Aaron sweeps his cement floor clean. He paused when a black Chevy Tahoe rolled up. He loaded pounds of finished rice into the back end, and the Tahoe slumped. He parches tens of thousands of pounds of rice each fall, all within three weeks—possibly the limit for a solo operation. He usually sells out before Thanksgiving. Once a fixture behind the counter of the local post office, Bette would send me boxes of rice when I lived in New York City. The final step in processing wild rice is "winnowing," or tossing the rice in the air.
Using a winnowing basket, or "nooshkaachinaaganan," the rice is tossed in the air numerous times to allow the lighter weight chaff to blow away, leaving the rice kernels ready for cooking or long-term storage. Wild rice was a staple food of American Indians. It is also a food for wild birds and waterfowl, especially mallard, bobolink, blackbirds, and Carolina rail. It has been a luxury food that has complimented wild game dishes for many years, but only when harvested from lakes and rivers.
However, during the last fifteen years, since its cultivation, wild rice has become more plentiful and can be found in many stores. One of the most famous Indian dishes was tassimanonny, which is wild rice, corn, and fish boiled together. Perhaps its greatest fame is when it is used as side dish with or inside wild gamebirds, ducks, pheasants, quail, and turkeys.
Today, because of its increased abundance, wild rice is used in a variety of ways. It is used in place of potatoes, either alone or mixed with other rice, in soups, salads and even deserts. Wild Rice is usually always sold as a dried whole grain. It is rich in carbohydrates, high in protein, the amino acid lysine and dietary fiber, but low in fat. It does not contain gluten. It is a terrific source of the minerals potassium and phosphorus, as well as the vitamins thiamine, riboflavin and niacin.
Because of its texture and density, wild rice must be cooked longer than true rice to become soft enough to eat. It generally takes about minutes to cook, when using a ratio of wild rice to water of approximately 1 to 3. Because of its high nutritional value and flavorful taste, wild rice has increased in popularity in the late 20th Century, and commercial cultivation began in the US and Canada to supply the increased demand.
In the United States the main producers are California and Minnesota where it is the official state grain and it is mainly cultivated in paddy fields. Reported to be diuretic and refrigerant, Zizania palustris is known to be a folk remedy for burns, heart ailments, hepatoses, nephrosis, pulmonosis, and stomach ailments.
Several Native American cultures, such as the Ojibwa, consider wild rice known as manoomin to the Objiwa to be a sacred component in their culture. The rice is harvested by hand, with two people sitting in a canoe, one of them knocking rice into the canoe with a pole while the other paddles slowly.
For these groups, these harvests are an important cultural and often economic event. Most of the wild rice that is available in grocery stores across the country is referred to as paddy rice. This type of rice is grown similar to brown rice in rice paddies. It cooks uniformly, and is consistently the same year after year because it is cultivated rice.
This type of rice is actually a hybrid developed by the University of Minnesota.
0コメント