Instructions: Amazing Grain
Red, black and exotic white rice varieties are finding their way to our tables

Six years ago, Ken Lee and Caryl Levine went to China to find a business that would captivate them. Any business. The young couple spent a week hanging out in Beijings rock-and-roll underground, exploring the idea of bringing Western concerts to China. Instead, two months later, they returned home with rice.

Today their company, Lotus Foods, is a small but rapidly growing concern, importing Chinese black rice, Bhutanese red rice and Bangladeshi kalijira rice and distributing two domestic specialty rices.

From their El Cerrito home office, they fax orders to Bhutan, a small, closed Buddhist nation next to Nepal, and talk to rice scientists around the world.

With prominent restaurants such as the French Laundry in Yountville and Viognier in San Mateo using Lotus Foods imports, these exotic grains soon may find a place in Bay Area pantries. Whats more, the companys two domestic rices - an organic jasmine rice from Texas and a California-grown Arborio type - give rice lovers even more choice and shed light on the valuable work of the worlds rice researchers.

As they evaluate the new arrivals, discriminating rice eaters are finding a lot to like.

"I think theyve done a good job of picking (varieties)," says Naomi Duguid, who, with Jeffrey Alford, wrote the scholarly and highly regarded "Seductions of Rice" (Artisan Books, 1998). Duguid praises the black rice for its tenderness and the red rice for its pleasantly grainy taste.

"And youre talking to a person whose fundamental bias is to eat white rice," Duguid says. "We were 70s brown-rice eaters, but now you would call us rice eaters in a serious way, and rice eaters eat white rice."

The inky sheen of the cooked black rice is beautiful with avocado slices or green vegetables, Duguid says. At Viognier, consulting chef Gary Danko mixes the black rice with basmati rice and serves the grains under roast duck. Pastry chef Stephen Durfee of French Laundry serves the steamed black rice for dessert with a tropical fruit salad and coconut and passion fruit sorbets.

Lee and Levine first tasted black rice in southwestern China but later heard about dozens of black rices grown all over the country. Like black-skinned chickens, the dark, whole-grain rice is considered therapeutic. "If you have iron-poor blood, you would eat black rice," Lee says. Typically, the rice is made into jook, a thick porridge.

The couple chose a variety of black rice they liked for its cooking qualities and flavor and now market it as Forbidden Rice, a reference to Forbidden City, home of the Chinese emperors. In times past, they were told, black rice was offered to the emperor as tribute.

But even with emperors out of the picture, getting the rice to the United States wasnt easy. Despite its vast rice fields, China imports rice to meet its needs; Chinese authorities were unwilling to let any black rice leave, although it is an insignificant part of the harvest. It took three years for Lee and Levine to find an exporter with enough pull to help them. But even before they had rice to sell, they knew they had found their business.

While the couple worked on their export problem, they met a man who knew the princess of Bhutan, who had attended the University of California at Berkeley. This connection led to the couple importing their first rice, the short reddish grain from Bhutan that is the daily staple of the Himalayan kingdom.

"We knew we needed distinctive varieties of the highest quality," Lee says, "and we had to have a story for marketing."

What a story. The red rice is grown at 8,000 feet and irrigated with the glacial waters of the high Himalayas - waters that, according to Lee, have trace minerals giving the rice its earthy flavor. Partly polished, it has more fiber than white rice but takes half the cooking time of brown rice.

"Its a nice compromise," Duguid says. "Its like what people used to eat when they were hand-milling with a mortar and pestle. Id serve it as a daily rice happily."

At Viognier, Danko mixes the red rice with couscous and serves it with an artichoke and chickpea stew. He also make pancakes with leftover red rice to serve with fillet of beef. To accompany quail, he makes thicker fried cakes with leftover risotto and red rice, egg and green onion.

Professional cooks are also enthusiastic about the kalijira rice, a tiny but elongated grain from Bangladesh that Lee and Levine have nicknamed "baby basmati." An aromatic rice like basmati, it cooks in 10 minutes, yielding a mound of fluffy, separate grains. In Bengal, where its also grown, its known as Govindabhog and considered a premium rice for pilafs and rice pudding.

Marie Simmons, the Oakland author of "Rice, the Amazing Grain" (Henry Holt, 1993), uses kalijira in rice salad, in an Indian-style rice pudding with saffron and to accompany fish, adding lemon zest and butter. The French Laundrys Durfee enriches cooked kalijira with a little cream and sugar, then serves the hot rice with caraway seed ice cream. ``You want people to think of rice pudding," he says, "although I dont really want to make rice pudding."

On the domestic front, Lee and Levine are helping to popularize Cal Riso, a trademarked Arborio- type organic rice grown on Bayliss Ranch near Yuba City. Donna Wallace, whose deceased husbands family has grown rice there since the late 1800s, says she first planted Cal Riso five years ago, convinced that consumers were ready to differentiate among rices with distinctive culinary uses.

"So we made it shorter, we made it stand up better, and we made it mill a little better," says McKenzie, summarizing years of work.

Knowledgeable Arborio users give Cal Riso high marks.

"I think its great," says Weezie Mott, an cooking teacher in Alameda who has lived in Italy and leads frequent tours there. Mott tried Cal Riso recently in asparagus risotto and compared it, as Wallace does, to carnaroli, another prized Italian risotto rice.

"It has very slow absorption and gives good resistance in the cooking," she says. "I thought it was just delightful. Im always skeptical when we try to copy something, but this is a lovely rice. Id use it anytime."

Paula Wolfert, a San Francisco food writer, says Cal Riso makes excellent paella, a dish for which most purists choose a short-grain Spanish rice. Wallace uses it to make torta, a sort of meatless meat loaf with rice, cheese and vegetables.

The organic Texas jasmine rice that Lee and Levine market is more controversial. "I adore it," Simmons says. "You cook that rice and it has the most incredible aroma and texture and sweetness. The grains are all perfect."

For another opinion, ask a Thai. Oakland cooking teacher Kasma Loha-Unchit scorns the Texas rice, insisting it is nothing like jasmine rice from Thailand. She first tried it in New Orleans when a cooking school provided the Texas rice for her class. Dismayed by its taste, she scoured the city for a Thai brand. Later, Simmons sent her more of the Texas jasmine. Loha-Unchit tried it again but threw it out.

"Thats my opinion of jasmine rice in Texas," she says.

Even in Thailand, jasmine is cultivated only in a small part of the country. Grown elsewhere, its aroma vanishes, she claims.

Linda Raun, who grows 350 acres of the Texas jasmine with her husband, Lowell, admits they have had a hard time breaking into the Asian market. Developed from Thai jasmine at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, the rice has - in the opinion of a novice - the popcorn fragrance and slightly sticky texture of Thai jasmine. (The rice even smells when its growing, says Raun, especially on a hot Texas day with a warm breeze.)

But Asians can tell the difference. Its not as white, they say. Its not as fragrant. Its not - well, its just not right.

"Anything thats not `it is different," McKenzie says, reflecting on the challenge of duplicating the precise taste, aroma and texture of a particular rice that some people eat every day. Maybe the issue shouldnt be whether the new rice is the same, but whether its as good, he suggests.

"Its like the California wine industry," the researcher says. "Were not growing Bordeaux, but we grow some pretty fine wine."

For the Rauns and other jasmine growers in Texas, the rice they were growing for the Asian customer has instead opened other markets. Consumers unfamiliar with aromatic rices are discovering their allure and learning that the rice world goes well beyond Uncle Bens. For cooks who welcome new tastes, the expanding rice market is a whole new playground.

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