[America’s rice roots run deep, though time and time again
it’s been underappreciated. The countrys rice landscape is more
diverse and more glorious than you might think; fresh-grown Heirloom
varieties are available from family farms coast to coast.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE AMERICAN HERITAGE RICE MOVEMENT IS NO FLUFF  
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Cathy Erway
November 14, 2023
Taste Cooking
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_ America’s rice roots run deep, though time and time again it’s
been underappreciated. The country's rice landscape is more diverse
and more glorious than you might think; fresh-grown Heirloom varieties
are available from family farms coast to coast. _

Robin Koda and her brother, Ross, run Koda Farms, a San Joaquin,
California–based rice farm and mill established by their
grandfather, Keisaburo Koda, in 1928., Luke Chappellet

 

Scorched. Soggy. Brittle. Soupy. JJ Johnson has heard it all when it
comes to people’s problems with cooking rice. This elemental
ingredient—one of the most popular staple grains around the
world—has a way of tripping up a lot of home cooks in America. And
rice doesn’t get a lot of respect from fine dining restaurants in
this country either, says Johnson, who’s cooked in his fair share of
them in New York City.

“A lot of people go to culinary school and maybe learn to make one
rice pilaf with a bay leaf—maybe,” says the affable chef and TV
host, who recently published his treatise on the subject, The Simple
Art of Rice: Recipes From Around the World for the Heart of Your
Table, with Danica Novgorodoff.

But head to the back of the house during a restaurant’s family meal?
There, he says, rice is given the adoring treatment it deserves from
cooks who care—in savory Mexican red rice, Puerto Rican arroz con
gandules, spicy West African tomato-based rice stews, and more,
underscoring the rich traditions and sacred place that rice occupies
around the world.

America’s rice roots run deep as well, though time and time again
it’s been underappreciated. Growing up in a Chinese American
household, I was taught to finish each grain from my bowl and to cook
it in a rice cooker, measuring the amount of water to cover by a
highly personalized designation on my index finger. That said, while
foundational, rice didn’t command much attention at meals—it was
the familiar yet plain-white backdrop to dishes rather than the star.
For many others, Johnson included, the rice of their youth was
parboiled, enriched, and bleached, industrialized processes that he
says diminish the taste, texture, and wholesomeness of rice while not
exactly inspiring lifelong adoration.

Thankfully, times have changed, with heirloom rice varieties making a
comeback and freshly grown rice available from family farms coast to
coast. From Carolina Gold, a long-grain variety that was once the cash
crop of the South, to Kokuho Rose, a 60-year-old short-grain variety
from California, North America is studded with gems that, while not
expansive, each tell a story of terroir and history while providing a
window into the future of farming—well worthy of being extolled in
fine dining spaces alongside wine and artisanal cheese.

The story of Carolina Gold rice, an heirloom variety, goes back to the
slave trade; Africans captured from rice-growing regions of West
Africa were purchased at a high price due to their agricultural
expertise, creating a successful rice industry for eighteenth-century
Southern white landowners. Named for its yellow hue, Carolina Gold was
America’s first commercial rice, but the industry collapsed
following emancipation, and by the 1940s the variety had nearly
disappeared in the United States. Thankfully the varietal was
preserved in a seed bank, and today it’s grown by a small handful of
farms stateside, including Anson Mills. (It is not to be confused with
Carolina brand Gold Parboiled Rice, the supermarket staple.)

While true Carolina Gold rice is still rare and hence difficult for
the average consumer to purchase, Johnson thinks we’re just at the
beginning of a big heirloom rice movement. “I think you’re gonna
start seeing it in the everyday supermarket,” he says,
optimistically, of the variety’s near future.

While Carolina Gold may be the best-known American heirloom rice,
there’s another variety readily available. Robin Koda and her
brother, Ross, are the third-generation owners of Koda Farms, a San
Joaquin, California–based rice farm and mill established by their
grandfather, Keisaburo Koda, in 1928. There he brought innovation to
rice growing, sowing seeds by airplane and incorporating rice drying
and milling on the farm. In 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signed Executive Order 9066, the Koda family was forced into
concentration camps along with all Japanese Americans, while their
land, homes, equipment, and livestock were seized. Following the war,
however, Keisaburo and his sons, Edward and William, rebuilt the farm.

Robin Koda admits that she’s probably still farming the land her
grandfather bought out of “that old Asian guilt thing”: “I just
feel like we’re indebted to them,” she said in a recent phone
call.

Over the subsequent decades, the Koda family introduced domestically
grown sweet rice and sweet rice flour to the market. An indispensable
ingredient in the Asian pantry, sweet rice is a short-grain variety
that’s sticky; its flour can be used to make glutinous rice-based
desserts like mochi and tangyuan or as a thickening agent for soups.
And with the help of the rice breeder Arthur Hughes Williams, the
family also developed a medium-grain, premium table rice that debuted
in 1962, called Kokuho Rose®. Bred over ten years specifically for
the microclimates on their farm in the 1950s, it’s an heirloom
variety.

“Our rice was the best-tasting Japanese table rice out there, and it
just became immensely popular. For a lot of Japanese Americans, to
this day, that flavor is embedded in their culinary history,” says
Koda.

This time of year, you can even try Koda Farms’ shinmai—or new
harvest—rice, says Koda. This just-harvested rice is ultrafresh and
flavorful: “It’s a real fleeting characteristic, and by December
it’s already starting to wane.”

Freshness is also a major distinction in the rices grown at Blue Moon
Acres—across the country in Pennington, New Jersey. The farm was
established by Jim Lyons, who began experimenting with rice
agriculture on the East Coast in the 1970s. Their rice is typically
freshly harvested, which is tastier and quicker to cook than rice
that’s been on the shelves for who knows how long, which can get
rancid, says Lyons.

“Rice is the centerpiece of the plate in a macrobiotic diet,” says
Lyons, discussing his own diet at the time. “That was our main food,
and I was living in Boston and Connecticut and eating rice from
California and Arkansas and very far away. I thought, this is anything
but locally grown.”

He and his wife, Kathy, relocated to Pennsylvania, where they started
a regenerative specialty farm in 1992; in 2007, they purchased 23
acres in Pennington, New Jersey, where they now grow and sell a
handful of rice varietals including black rice, sushi rice, and
Maratelli rice, the latter an Italian short-grain variety. Customers
of their rice include Eleven Madison Park and FIELDTRIP, JJ
Johnson’s fast-casual rice bowl restaurant in Harlem.

And due to their growing techniques, which have been honed over the
years to suit their land and microclimate, arsenic levels in Blue Moon
Acres rice are much lower. A naturally occurring element that is
harmful in high doses, arsenic is present in foods like rice, meat,
and seafood, as well as drinking water—yet most states limit arsenic
levels to 10 parts per billion. Lyons says their rice tests much lower
for arsenic than commercial rice grown in Arkansas and California, and
this is due to their dry growing techniques.

“In a flooded paddy, you would have all this anaerobic microbiology,
which facilitates the uptake of arsenic and creates methane,” says
Lyons. “Growing in a dry field is better.”

Not surprisingly, these farming techniques require a lot more labor,
such as weeding, which is why so few farms do it; at Blue Moon Acres,
they’ve been developing special equipment to help automate the
work—which Lyons hopes may help other people grow rice in the same
manner.

Growing rice without the use of many chemical fertilizers—that is,
organically—presents unique challenges wherever the farm is located.
But these principles are largely the reason why Lundberg Family Farms
has stayed in business since 1937. It was founded by Albert and
Frances Lundberg, who left Nebraska in the wake of the Dust Bowl for
the Sacramento Valley, and it’s still operated by their descendants
in Chico, California.

“They saw how farming techniques really stripped the land of
topsoil, so when they moved to California, they wanted to do things
differently—in partnership with the land, not against it,” says
Brita Lundberg, a fourth-generation farmer.

By the 1960s, when the organic movement was in its infancy, a Japanese
food distributor called Chico-San was looking for someone to grow
organic rice, and the Lundbergs volunteered. “It was the beginning
of a wonderful journey of farming organically and continuing to care
for the soil,” says Lundberg.

In the early 1970s, the Chico-San rice cake factory suffered a
devastating fire that halted its operations for years, forcing the
Lundbergs to find more domestic buyers for their organic rice—like
the natural food stores and co-ops that were just beginning to pop up
around the country. It also led them to start selling their rice
directly to customers: “My grandpa and his brothers bought an old
bread truck and hired a driver to stop at health food stores from
California to Washington,” says Brita.

Around the same time, Brita’s grandparents became volunteers with
the Peace Corps and moved their family to Brazil, where they shared
their rice farming and milling techniques with local farmers. In turn,
the family was exposed to several varieties of rice they’d never
seen before—including black rice and red rice varieties.

“Dad would bring them home, and we would have them with fish or
chicken, and they were amazing,” says Bryce Lundberg, a
fourth-generation owner (and Brita’s father) who lived in Brazil
with his parents at the time. “The color, the flavor—I was used to
eating organic short-grain brown rice, which I love, but being able to
see and taste the diversity and color—it really made an impression
on my dad.”

When the family eventually returned to California after four years,
they began cultivating new varieties of rice for their farm, one at a
time, crossing varieties purchased from seed banks with some of their
own to create unique hybrids suited for their soil. Currently,
Lundberg Family Farms offers 17 varieties of long, short, and
medium-grain rices, like Red Jasmine and Black Pearl rice. And
they’re continually developing more varieties.

“One of the reasons we have a nursery is that we’re really
interested in growing different varieties of rice—but another reason
is that we have to grow rice so differently than other farms, because
we grow organically and regeneratively,” says Brita.

Weeds are one of the biggest challenges currently. There can be 100
different types of weed for every rice plant, says Bryce. A lot of
other rice breeding programs look for varieties that are compatible
with certain chemicals, but because Lundberg Family Farms doesn’t
use these chemicals, they’re looking for varieties compatible with
organic and regenerative practices—as well as for characteristics
like delicious taste and aroma.

It takes a village to do this—the Lundbergs have contracted with a
handful of like-minded family farms in the region who have grown rice
for their brand over the decades. Together they continue to adapt and
develop seeds for a changing climate. But it’s work well worth the
effort, the family says.

“There are not many other rice farms doing this, but from the
beginning, we’ve had such loyal customers and people who’ve
cheered us on, saying, ‘This is what we need,’” says Bryce.

How to buy American rice:

    Koda Farms: Developed in the 1950s, Kokuho Rose® is a
medium-grain Japanese-style varietal available as white, brown,
organic white, or organic brown rice from the family-owned Koda Farms
in California. They also sell Sho-Chiku-Bai® sweet rice and mochiko
sweet rice flour, from the Japanese-style sticky rice developed for
their land in the 1940s. Find them in supermarkets and Asian grocery
stores nationwide, or from the online retailers Wellspent Market,
Housework and Zingerman’s.

    Blue Moon Acres: The certified-organic rice varietals grown on
this New Jersey farm include white sushi rice, long-grain brown rice,
and Maratelli rice, a short-grain Italian variety. Buy from the
farm’s online store.  

    Lundberg Family Farms: The California-based rice grower is
owned by five generations of the Lundberg family and offers around 17
rice varietals, including Red Jasmine rice, Black Pearl rice, and
brown Basmati rice, as well as rice blends and rice cakes. Find them
in grocery stores nationwide and in their online store.

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* rice farms
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