How to do Rice

Rice... Having friends who have done some work in the paddy fields it made me want to find out more and tell you about it.....seriously, you’ll never take it for granted again.

“Eat” in Thailand, is “Kin Khâo” which literally means “to consume rice”; Vietnam is soon to become the worlds biggest producer of rice; it seems so much of both Vietnam and Cambodia is covered by endless, eye-achingly bright green paddy fields. It’s easy to take them for granted, until you are aware of the back breaking work that goes into producing the staple crop of the east.

There are two rice seasons a year; a shorter one which produced the sticky rice, and a longer one, for the longer grain rice.

First the paddy field is flooded from a nearby water source, channels dug by hand, and sometimes pumped by rudimentary human powered machines. When this is done, the rice seed is scattered. Once the rice plants have begun to poke their sharp spikes above the water level, these plants are uprooted, and replanted in rows, at a correct distance apart to allow the right amount of root growth for the optimum crop yield. This sounds so simple , but it is long hours of back breaking work, done by hand by workers bent double in the fields.

The plants are rough and sharp and hard on the hands; the water full of leeches, huge water spiders, snakes and other unpleasant creepy crawlies. The water is also sometimes uncomfortably hot, having been heated all day in the sun, so provides no refreshment or respite from the heat of the sun.

The rice is then cut, also by hand, and the seed separated from the stalks. The stalks are kept in numerous haystacks you can see by the side of the road, out outside all rural stilt houses, as its’ essential in the rainy season to feed animals when much of the grazing land is flooded.

To separate the seed from the husks they are rubbed with basic machinery, often man-powered, and then tossed in baskets by hand to keep the seeds and fling the husks away.

That’s for the basic rice, however it’s often then cracked by hand in giant mortar and pestles before being stone ground to produce the rice flour used for noodles and spring rolls the glutinous puddings that are popular here

Here's our little tourguide powering the machine used to pump water into the fields to flood them:

Now I also understand why it’s so jolly fattening, as you need all that energy to produce it in the first place!