Rice

Oryza sativa

Rice is the classic koji substrate and a grain with a small but real foothold in Northeast farming. For most of this notebook it matters as the traditional partner for koji in amazake, shio koji, and rice koji experiments, but it is also one of the few regional crops with an active group of farmers working out how to grow it.¹ McGee places rice’s domestication in semitropical Asia, where its ability to grow in wet, hot conditions set it apart from the temperate cereals that dominate this region.²

Northeast rice farming is young and small-scale but well documented. Cornell Small Farms profiles Ever-Growing Family Farm in the Hudson Valley, run by Jola farmers from Gambia, as New York’s only commercial rice farm; one of its varieties, Duborskian, was introduced to New England in 1983 by Christian Elwell, among the first known rice farmers in the region.¹ In Vermont, Boundbrook Farm grows cold-tolerant Hokkaido varieties in irrigated paddies, and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association’s Maine Rice Project has run multi-year trials showing temperate rice can be grown productively in the Northeast.³⁴ Cold-hardy varieties and careful timing of transplanting are the levers these growers use to fit a warmth-loving crop into a short season.¹

As food, rice behaves differently from the hulled Northeast grains. Rice flour is around 90% starch, with the smallest starch granules of the major cereals, which is part of why rice-based kojis break down so quickly and completely.⁵ Cooking rice is mostly a matter of gelatinizing those starch granules, and parboiled rice picks up a nutty flavor because the soaking activates enzymes that generate sugars and amino acids for later browning.⁶ Fresh rice from Northeast farms is sold as a specialty grain: it cooks with less water and tastes nuttier than aged store rice, which gives it a different role than the commodity rice most koji recipes assume.¹