Why you should know:
Arsenic is a carcinogen and has various other negative health effects; enough to warrant exposure limits in various jurisdictions. A five minute boil-and-discard step before cooking is a simple way to reduce your exposure, especially if you eat a lot of rice.
Details are in the study, linked in the title of this post. Here’s a diagram from the abstract:
It takes 40 mins to fully cook brown rice plus the 5-8 mins it takes for it to boil. This will add 15-20 mins more to overall cooking. As someone who eats rice almost everyday, I’ll probably want to start doing this, but man that’s a lot more time and water wasted 😞
Are you counting 5-8 minutes to heat water + 5 minutes parboiling the rice + 5-8 minutes to heat fresh water? If so, you’re double-counting one of those steps, because you already have to heat water when cooking rice. Using your figures, the overall cooking time would only increase by 10-13 minutes.
You could reduce that to ~5 minutes by heating your cooking water during the parboil step, rather than after, so it’s ready to go when the parboil is done. In a kettle or second pan, for example.
You could further reduce it to <1 minute (the time it takes to replace the parboil water) by taking 5 minutes off the cooking time, since the newly added 5 minute parboil is cooking.
I hope the fediverse doesn’t cook meals one step at a time. That would take ages. :)
I’m asian and grew up in Asia cooking rice without a rice cooker. This is how we do it:
If I was to boil the rice for 5 mins and throw the water out, that means I need to boil water first (5-8 mins), throw in the rice and wait 5 minutes, then throw out the water. Only then will I do the above steps. The fresh water needs to boil again (5-8 mins) before I simmer for 40 mins.
Good point on heating the new batch of water while doing the initial boil. I can’t say I’ve ever cooked rice by throwing it into already boiling water though, so we’ll see how it turns out.
Do you mean when replacing the parboil water? At that point, the rice would already have been brought to a boil gradually. Discarding the parboil water and pouring in fresh boiling water wouldn’t be like throwing dry rice into a boiling saucepan.
Or are you thinking of changing your process, by no longer bringing the water to a boil with the rice already in it, but instead waiting to add the rice until after the parboil water has reached a full boil? I realize that’s what the infographic shows, but I don’t think it’s necessary to do it that way. If anything, I would expect your way (bring rice & water to a boil together) to pull out more arsenic.