Friday, April 10, 2015

Making rice better with coconut oil? (And let's talk food poisoning)

New coconut rice cooking method claims to slash kilojoules - Health & Wellbeing

Well, this sounds all very preliminary, and as if it is sponsored by a coconut oil manufacturer, but the claim is that adding a small-ish amount of coconut oil to cooking rice, then cooling and reheating it, makes it better for you by increasing the amount of resistant starch.  (It's funny how making starch indigestible seems to be a good thing for the gut, but there you go.)

The article also makes some points about being careful with re-heating rice so as to avoid food poisoning.

I've always had the intuition that, of the things that could give you food poisoning, reheated plain cooked rice would have to be on the low end of the scale of risk.  But, I was told decades ago by someone who worked in the microbiology, water and food safety field, that this was not true.  It's one of the riskier foods for it, apparently, but I don't know why.

The story above says to not keep rice in the fridge for more than 3 days.  I'm sure we often go way past that, and there is not a time I know of when eating re-heated rice has apparently made me sick.  In fact, I have been thinking lately, it's been a long, long time since I've had a stomach upset of any variety.

Re-heated rice from the microwave is a marvel.  In fact, if you only had a microwave for melting butter, defrosting meat, and re-heating cold or frozen rice, it would still be worth it.

And speaking of food poisoning, in my other wanderings around the net lately, I have come across a blog that is absolutely chock full of food poisoning news - the Barfblog.  (It's a more serious site that the name suggests.)

The main author at the site, Doug Powell, appears to be a Canadian who worked in Kansas, but his blog entries make enough references to Brisbane to make me suspect he might live here now. Maybe he can tell me what has caused a repeated series of food poisoning outbreaks at the wonderful (well, provided you don't eat there) Brisbane Convention Centre in the last 6 months?  I have never heard if the cause had been definitely identified.

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