In daily life, sometimes for convenience or in a hurry, you may choose to soak in a bucket of instant noodles, which is cheap and convenient.
In recent years, prepared foods have become more and more popular, and various types of self-heating hot pot and self-heating rice have also appeared. Just heat it and it's ready to eat, no more cooking.
Instant noodles also need hot water in a kettle, and self-heating rice can even save hot water, tear and pour each ingredient package, and wait about ten minutes to eat steaming hot pot or rice bowl.
But I don't know if you have ever had such a question, the dishes in the self-heating hot pot and the dishes in the rice bowl are cooked foods that have been processed in advance, and it is understandable that they can be eaten after being heated by the bottom heating pack. However, the dry "rice", after such a period of heating, can be turned into raw rice and become ripe rice, which is much faster than the rice cooker at home.
How exactly is this done?
What kind of rice is in self-heating rice?
Friends with a little life experience should know that it generally takes 30-40 minutes to cook rice in our lives, and even if it is a quick cooking mode, it takes 15-20 minutes to cook a pot of rice.
But the rice in self-heating rice only needs to be heated for about 10 minutes before eating, and some don't even need to add water to the rice grains.
In fact, the rice in these self-heating food rice packets is really not natural rice, but artificial "fake" rice, so it can be eaten without cooking for a long time.
Then the question arises, what exactly are these "fake" rice made of, and is eating these "fake" rice harmful to our health?
In fact, the artificial rice in self-heating rice is not strictly speaking "fake rice", because it is still made from natural rice, but it has undergone some processing.
This is because in order to better meet the needs of the market, self-heating food tries to shorten the waiting time as much as possible and make the rice eat faster, so artificial rice that is easier to ripen is selected.
At present, among the self-heating rice we can buy in the market, there are three main types of common artificial rice, namely reconstituted rice, re-dried rice and aseptic rice.
The first type of reconstituted rice, as the name suggests, is to crush natural rice into flour, then add starch, and finally reconstitute rice grains by squeezing and maturing.
In the case of re-drying rice, the rice is first cooked and then dried and packaged through drying technology.
Aseptic rice is even simpler, that is, the cooked rice is sterilized and then sealed and packaged.
Like the vegetable buns in self-heating food, they are pre-matured. In other words, it is actually cooked rice, but it is relatively dry and has a low moisture content, and it looks like raw rice, but it is actually cooked rice.
What are the ingredients of artificial rice!??
Knowing what artificial rice is and how it is made, let's focus on reconstituted rice, after all, it is the only one that has been artificially reconstituted. As we mentioned earlier, reconstituted rice needs to be ground first and then starch added, so are there any other components in reconstituted rice?
In 2022, a reporter from Zhejiang Evening News found Shen Lirong, a professor of nutrition at Zhejiang University, and under the recommendation of Professor Shen Lirong, the reporter came to the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences and a testing institution, and after precise testing, the mystery of reconstituted rice was revealed.
Under a 10,000x microscope, the natural rice we eat every day shows rock-like textures, which are the textures of starch. Although the surface is not smooth, the structure is relatively complete.
Moving the lens to the rice in the self-heating rice, the surface texture of the artificial rice appears completely different under a high-powered microscope.
At first glance, it looks very much like rain-washed sand, and its surface is similarly uneven, but unlike natural rice, its components become finer. This is because recombinant rice has undergone a grinding process and is composed of starch, and the original starch structure has been destroyed, so it has a more finely crushed appearance.
If you zoom in 20 times and focus on the appearance of natural rice and reconstituted rice, you will find that there is a clear difference between the shape of natural rice and the shape of artificial rice.
Looking at the natural rice in the picture below, it can be seen that the two ends of the natural rice are not piled up, one side is pointed and the other is round, and the pointed end is the position of the rice germ, that is, the location of the rice germination.
In the case of man-made reconstituted rice, the ends of the rice are perfectly symmetrical and both are round. This is because these rices are made up of rice and starch and have been artificially reshaped, which is simply molded rather than naturally formed, so it can be symmetrical.
If you pay attention, you will also find that the artificial rice is very slender and has an unnatural curvature, which is caused by the molds of the machine.
Knowing the difference between the appearance of reconstituted rice and natural rice, let's take a look at the ingredient list of self-heating rice to see what ingredients are added to these reconstituted rices.
It can be seen that basically all self-heating rice, in addition to the rice itself, has some other ingredients added, such as edible corn starch and mono- and diglycerol fatty acid esters, or some food additives.
With this plus that, is eating too much artificial rice harmful to the human body?
Recombinant rice is based on natural rice, and corn starch and mono- and diglyceride fatty acid esters are also added. Cornstarch is made from corn and is a very natural ingredient.
Corn is a "golden crop" that we are very familiar with, and adding a little cornstarch to reconstituted rice can also improve the taste of rice.
What about mono- and diglycerides? What are these ingredients that we are so confused to read? Will the human body harm our health after ingestion?
Although we are unfamiliar with the name of this additive, this is not the first time we have come into contact with this ingredient. Mono and diglycerides are emulsifiers that are widely used in the production of desserts such as biscuits, pastries, bread and other foods that we eat daily.
In fact, emulsifiers are mainly used to improve the elasticity, toughness and strength of dough, and in short, they are used to improve the taste of food and prevent bread from aging.
According to experts, a moderate intake of mono- and diglycerides will not cause any harm to the human body, but because it will increase the content of fatty acids in the human body, it will produce the effect of raising blood lipids and blood sugar to a certain extent, so diabetics should pay attention to their intake and try not to eat.
And after the precise testing of the testing institutions mentioned above, the safety of these recombinant rice with other substances added has also been affirmatively answered.
The agency tested the total number of colonies of these self-heating rice, Salmonella and other common colonies, and the results showed that they were within the normal range, so recombinant rice can be used with confidence. Just because the recombinant rice has been ground and restructured, the nutrients are lost compared with natural rice, and it is not as nutritious as natural rice, but there is basically no safety hazard when eaten.
Therefore, although the rice of self-heating rice is artificial "fake" rice, the safety hazard should still be relatively small.
And although there was no unified industry standard before, with the introduction of relevant regulations on prefabricated dishes this year, the processing and manufacturing of prefabricated dishes such as self-heating rice will be subject to stricter and unified demarcation, which delineates a bottom line of food safety for our consumers.
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