To explain my YES to prior washing of rice...
Rinsing rice has been done for ages
to rid the grains of surface starches, prevents clumping, and yields a
clean, fresh taste. If you rinse rice very well, the cooked rice will
have a reduced likelihood of clumping together because you have removed
some of the total starch present (surface starch).
Some types of rice from some parts of
the world are processed with talc -a mineral made up of hydrated
magnesium silicate in order to give it a whiter and cleaner appearance.
These types of rice need a rinse to remove this talc. Sometimes when
rice has been packed and stored for long, you see some kind of dust on
their surface when you take them out, washing will get rid of dusts like
these and sometimes few weevils in the rice.
To explain my NO, which also answers “if you wash nutrients away when you wash rice”…
Starch is Carbohydrate so when you wash
it away, you wash away nutrients but there is more of that inside the
rice. You may not want to worry much about this. However, to make milled
white rice healthier and more nutritious in countries like the United
States, it is required that processors enrich it with vitamins and other
nutrients.
These fortifications appear as a dusty
layer on the individual grains. If you want to also preserve those
nutrients, washing is not for you – it is NO-NO. But if you don’t need
this nutrients, probably because you are eating your rice with some rich
vegetable sauce and other nutritious foods, you can wash it off.
Conclusively, rinsing rice prior to
cooking or not depends on what you want out of your rice but I do it
because I cannot distinguish between a dust that comes as a result of
fortification and that which is there as a result of dirt.
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