Grain of the Week - 41 & 42 - Ponni Parboiled Rice (Ponni Puzhungal arisi – புழுங்கல் அரிசி)

Every household has a house rice, the one that is regularly used while the other varieties and grains make an appearance every now and then. In our house Ponni Parboiled Rice is that rice. Parboiled rice gets its generic name from the process of boiling, steaming and drying the rice before it is milled. This makes the rice more nutritious than rice that is milled to remove the husk and polished, what
we usually call raw rice (Pachha Arisi – பச்சரிசி). Ponni is also available as raw rice and is shinier and whiter than the parboiled kind.

Parboiled is sometimes thought of as a name given to precooked rice but here it is not. Cooked parboiled rice is much softer to the touch than cooked raw rice. The steaming in the parboiling process enables the rice to absorb all the nutrients and changes the starch so when it is cooked it is less glutinous and firmer, less sticky and less dry. source:

Parboiled rice does not cook faster than raw rice, instead it actually takes a bit longer and the quantity of water added is a bit more as well. Ponni parboiled rice can be used to make pretty much all rice dishes including biryani.

Ponni rice as we know it today is the product of the Tamil Nadu Rice Research institute's work to give a better yielding, disease resistant variety to the Cauvery Delta farmers. Known by its former name "mashuri kuttai" the rice has through various research cycles before it arrived at its current form. Source - The Hindu


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