Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where in typical fashion Jon is barreling into a topic he barely comprehends because he forgot to properly juggle his responsibilities, so this post isn’t as thoroughly researched as he would like. But, it serves as a fun point of transition without having to go into full “culinary compendium” mode. So we’re going to be discussing Rice Flours today: The Wet, the Brown, and the Sticky.

What is Rice Flour?

Rice Flour is what you get when you grind rice into flour.

There will come a day when this joke stops entertaining me. It is not this day.

To be more thorough, and just because I don’t think I’ve ever covered it before: “flour” is a term that refers to finely processed powder of functionally any grain, legume, cereal, nut, bean, or seed. In short, if it can be reduced to a powder purely through crushing, the resulting powder is called “flour”. That ‘purely through crushing’ clause is why we don’t have things like “pork flour”, though honestly, just give it time. That time being “the past”, because people have already done it. “Pork Flour” is highly ground fried pork skin (ie, toss your pork crackling/chicharrons/rinds into a food processor and blitz into dust) used in some savory baking applications (you want some super-porky Bacon Cornbread?) and Keto applications (you want some pork-crusted pork chops?). What was I saying? Oh, yeah, flour. So the term ‘flour’ comes from a phrase/idea of “fleur du farine”, the “flower/finest of the meal”. (As in “cornmeal”) Like, you could get ground up wheat and other plants in various…(Jesus, this is an etymological mess) GRAINS, with the smallest/finest being the “flower”.

That all make sense? You had coarse-grain wheatmeal, fine-grain wheatmeal, and the FINEST grain, which was called “flour” because it was the prettiest. So the next time someone pulls the “why’s it called flour when there’s no flowers in it”, you can be a pretentious dick, and point out that it’s the millennia old equivalent of how teens today call people and things GOATS.

Is this the GOAT of goats?

So, you make rice flour when you take any kind of rice, and pound it into powder. Now, for most long or short grain rices, this is going to produce BASICALLY the same product. Like, would Basmati rice flour taste different than Jasmine rice flour? Yes, a little. Probably. Again, not as deeply researched as I would like. But it would cook basically the same way, and do basically the same thing. This is “Rice Flour”

Seen here. Sitting there. MENACINGLY.

And it’s used for a variety of things. For one thing, rice was the predominant crop of South China, and Southeast Asia/East Asia for millennia before wheat showed up, so obviously it has a crucial place in those cuisines. It’s also been very useful for those who need or want gluten-free diets, since gluten is only formed in specific grains like wheat, barley, and rye, and therefore Rice Flour (and other non-grain flours) can substitute for various processes that would otherwise use flours with gluten. This has actually led to some culinary discoveries: for instance, it’s been discovered that lower gluten content batters fry up crispier in deep-frying, and the slightly different texture of fried rice flour can be quite appealing. So Boom, bread your chicken in rice-flour, and it’s extra crispy! You may remember that our Pok-Pok Chicken Wings used a predominantly Rice-Flour based coating for this reason. (You may also remember they also had tempura batter mix, which is made using normal flour: this is because gluten DOES help the batter stick to the food it’s being fried on. If you ONLY use rice flour to bread things, you can sometimes end up with a still-tasty-but-strange situation where the breading has crisped and hardened…while the meat inside has shrunk, leaving a weird “pocket” or gap between the breading and the meat.)

So that’s normal Rice Flour. But we weren’t using normal rice flour for the mochi, we used Sweet rice flour. What’s that about?

Things Get Sticky

First of all, let’s get some things out of the way. Sweet Rice Flour, aka Glutinous Rice Flour, aka Sticky Rice Flour has three names, and there’s a lot of confusion about them, because words are dumb. First off: Sweet Rice Flour has no more sugar in it than normal rice flour. That name comes from the fact that glutinous/stick rice is most often used FOR sweet applications, because of its texture being more candy/dessert like. Second, there’s no gluten in glutinous rice. The problem here is that ‘gluten’ originally, just meant ‘glue’. This gets a little complicated, but stick with me: in Latin, Gluten means glue/beeswax, basically ‘sticky goop made from animals’. THEN, it gets used for specifically a type of goop that’s now called ‘fibrin’, which is a goo that makes blood clots: the proteins make a mesh that traps the blood. So ‘gluten” refers to stick goop from animals, and thus the word ‘glutinous” or “gluten-like” is created. THEN, people discover that there is a protein in wheat that makes a mesh that traps air, and that’s how bread works. So they call that “wheat gluten”, since it’s just like gluten, but in wheat. Then everyone forgets the first definition of gluten, except for the occasional person who wants a way to say “sticky” without sounding vaguely like a child, who pop open the dictionary and get ‘glutinous’.

In the first 50 results for “glutinous” on flickr, 48 of them were of rice-based dishes, one was a bush, and then there was THIS high-shutter-speed pic of seawater, where it DOES look like goop.

So technically, Glutinous rice flour is just the fancy way of saying “sticky rice flour”, which gets used in candies and desserts, so it’s sometimes called “sweet rice flour”, since it’s the one you use for sweets.

Boom boom boom.

Also, you can’t always use it for the same things as normal rice flour. You CAN fry chicken in it, since what’ll happen is the flour will absorb the moisture, get a little goopy…and then be fried into a complicated protein structure by the hot oil. But it’ll be much more crunchy than rice flour’s crispy. A good comparison is this suggestion from runawayrice.com: the closest substitute for Rice flour is normal flour, or another gluten-free flour. The closest substitute for glutinous rice flour is tapioca starch. One makes “bread/cake”, the other makes “bubble tea pearls/pudding”.

Or even BOTH!

Alright, those are the two big boys. What else is there?

The Also-Rans

Brown Rice Flour also exists, and is to Rice Flour what Brown Rice is to White Rice: healthier, more pretentious, and probably harder to cook.

Korea has a special version of Rice flour they sometimes call “short rice flour”, but is more accurately called “Wet-milled Rice Flour”, referring respectively to the fact that it’s ground from a Korean variety of short-grain rice while still wet, meaning it’s technically closer to a paste than a true ‘powder’, and has to be frozen or refrigerated. It is otherwise basically partially hydrated normal rice flour, though Koreans insist it provides a different texture and flavor than other rice flours, with the ONLY potential comparison being rice flour derived from Japanese short-grain sushi rice.

In the Philippines, they make galapóng, a rice dough made by wet-milling soaked (and often lightly fermented) glutinous rice in a manner not entirely different from the Korean method above.

Are there other varieties and intricacies of Rice Flours? Yes. Definitely. Is it also 3:50 in the morning, and therefore plumbing the secrets of those varieties and intricacies will have to wait? I am already passing out.  

MONDAY: SHIT, I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE A PLAN BY THIS POINT. IS IT GOING TO BE STUFFING? GRAVY? I DON’T KNOW.

THURSDAY: WE’LL SEE IF I CAN FIND ANOTHER CARTOON/MOVIE TO REVIEW, SINCE IT’S, YOU KNOW, THANKSGIVING AND ALL.