— Go to the store, buy some rice.
— Ok! Easy! Which one?
— Just get a good one…
— (100,500 types of rice in the store) 🤯
Rice takes up an impressive amount of shelf space in Singapore supermarkets, which makes sense for a staple used in dishes such as nasi lemak and Hainanese chicken rice. You can find everything from long-grain jasmine rice to short-grain sushi rice, often in bags ranging from 5 to 20 kg. Coming from a place where I often bought one-kilogram bags or boil-in-bag rice, I found the scale of the choice overwhelming.
A few years ago, right after moving to Singapore, I even bought a rice cooker, thinking I could handle this new culinary tradition. I only used it a couple of times, as initially, it was hard to understand what kind of rice was needed for my favorite dishes. Perhaps I should have taken a local cooking course or asked for advice from neighbors. The feeling of standing before shelves with an endless choice of rice without understanding the differences between them was genuinely overwhelming!
Something else caught my eye in the supermarket: a fibre product to add while cooking rice. Its packaging presents it as a way to add dietary fibre and reduce the meal’s glycaemic response; I have not independently tested that claim.