Basmati Rice, the “queen of fragrance”, the “perfumed one”, "the only thing my Indian engineer roommate knew how to make". When you eat rice every day, as most people do in South-East Asia, the preparation becomes an art form in itself. My Indian former roommate didn't cook very often. When she did she always made rice, perfect rice, the kind where each individual grain was tender, fluffy and stayed away from its neighbouring grains as if it had a cold. It was never over-cooked and there was never a rice cooker involved, just extensive stove-top experience to the point where making rice became second nature. To make it poorly would have been difficult for her. We got along very well, she and I, but this expertise was not something we shared. I coveted her rice skills.
So why did she grow up with these skills and I didn't? Somehow I was never taught to wash the polish off the rice under several changes of water, or to let the rice sit in water for at least 30 minutes before letting it touch heat. Sure, I was taught not to peek and to let it cook with the lid on, but I've burned far too many pots of rice by following that rule to call myself a firm believer.
My roommate grew up in the right environment to learn perfect rice skills. Basmati has been a cherished food staple and cornerstone of Southeast Asian food and culture for thousands of years. My European roots mean my family has been eating it for only a few centuries. So my roommate really did have a good head start on me. In my family rice was just rice, no matter what kind it really was, but in India this is definitely not the case. While Southeast Asian farming communities have developed and conserved over a thousand distinct varieties of rice, the foothills of the Himalayas are the world’s veritable basmati breadbasket. Though at-home cooks and restaurants alike often substitute less expensive jasmine rice for basmati, to rice connoisseurs there are differences in smell, taste and texture. Jasmine, for example, will try very hard to cling together after cooking. My roommate would have given me a very disappointed look if I'd suggested she borrow some of my jasmine rice for dinner if she'd somehow made it through her ten kilogram bag of basmati before being able to lug her rice-toting grocery cart to the store for more.
In India, as I learned, rice is eaten as the foundation of almost every meal, either served on the side, or as a bed for the rest of the meal. It's often served in addition to breads; there is nothing French about the amount of carboydrates in a traditional Indian meal. Rice is also found in many Indian dishes, like biryanis (elaborate mixed meat, vegetable, and yogurt dishes) and pullaos. It's pulverized or used whole in Indian rice pudding, dosai (crepe-like wraps for spicy potato mixtures), and idli (small steamed disks to be dipped in coconut and chutney and sambar), and it can accompany just about every curry, masala, and pulse (a lentil or bean dish).
Rice is so important to everyday life in India that it's intertwined with religion and happiness. Long before North Americans threw grains of rice over newly-weds post-wedding ceremony, Hindus believed that a similar act of pouring rice over the heads of the young couple would bless both the married pair and the pourer. No need to get married yourself to ensure a life of rice and happiness, since you could just bless other happy couples and give yourself a blessing at the same time.
So if you ate rice every day, even with all the variety, wouldn't you get sick of it? How much flavour can rice possibly have? It’s all relative. Compared to the sticky short-grain rice used in Chinese, Japanese, and Thai cooking, basmati is actually considered bland, but the mild nutty flavour and the aromatics in basmati - the smell of popcorn - are completely unique. Besides, can you ever get sick of popcorn? Like rice, you certainly don't eat it plain all the time.
India’s easterly neighbours like it when their rice sticks together, and it’s true that the stickiness makes it easier to pick up with chopsticks. How many times have you been frustrated by all those grains that sit in the bottom of your bowl covered in sauce, refusing to make the journey to your mouth via chopsticks? Indians got around this problem by eating without utensils, using only their right hand. Meals may be messy operations, but each grain remains separate despite miraculously fluffing to twice its length while cooking instead of staying short and sticky. Practical considerations aside, basmati is so intrinsic to Indian food culture that no amount of arguing would convince a woman from the Punjab in Northern India to switch to sticky rice if given the choice, just as my former roommate would scoff at jasmine.
More than being a local staple, basmati is one of India’s best-known exports, and is more common in North American markets than other prized Indian varieties of long-grain, aromatic rice found throughout India, like ponni, hailing from the south, or maharashtra, from the west. Unfortunately, because of its international popularity, basmati has become the victim of biopiracy and intellectual property theft. A basmati knock-off first appeared in supermarkets in 1997 when an American company called RiceTec Inc. was granted a patent to label and sell their rice as “Basmati”. Suddenly Indian basmati had to compete for the stomachs of consumers around the world who may have only noticed the difference in price between two basmati options (RiceTec's costing less), not the difference in origin. India argued to the World Trade Organization (WTO) that based on the Treaty on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which the US and India had both signed, the US should recognize the Geographical Indication (GI) of basmati and not sell what India viewed to be a basmati impersonator. This meant that India had to convince the WTO that basmati was a good whose "quality and reputation were attributable solely to India". To be called “basmati”, the rice should have to be produced within a particular area and achieve a particular standard. As champagne is to France, they asserted that basmati is to India, and just as American producers are not allowed to label their wine as champagne, Americans should not be able to label their rice as basmati. Unfortunately, even though RiceTec did lose its patent, the same rice is still sold to consumers as "Texmati" and "American Basmati". Each country that signed the TRIPS is allowed to administer its own Geographical Indications protection, making it difficult for India to protect its products from other countries playing with different rules. In Canada, based on our country's Trade-Marks Act, it's illegal to pass off a product as something it’s not, but Texmati is still available in supermarkets, so it seems that it's legal to import products from other countries that produce these products, even if the production itself would be illegal in Canada.
Being a basmati rice producer is not all fun and games. It's actually a little easier to produce basmati than sticky rice, since the long-grain basmati is more tolerant of drought, insects and disease, but basmati is more resistant to the use of chemical fertilizers, making it hard to produce on a large scale. It's also much harder to harvest basmati by machine than by hand because it grows over five feet in height and tends to fall over into the mud, making the job a little messy. More labour is required to produce less rice than other varieties would yield, so basmati is a costly product. "American basmati" is actually a hybrid of Indian rice and a more disease- and insect-resistant variety that can be machine harvested, making it less expensive to produce, but the hybridization, the nontraditional production methods, and the different area of production area mean it's not exactly basmati anymore. This is where the importance of Geographical Indications comes into play, since consumers may be willing to pay more for products that have a certain known quality, like splurging on champagne instead of buying a cheaper but less prestigious sparkling wine. A Chardonnay from Australia, for example, would never be thought of as the same wine as a chardonnay from France. In India's case, if the term “basmati” can refer to both the traditional Indian product and the mass-produced, less expensive American product, it may be hard to tell the products apart, and more importantly, to tell if Indian basmati is worth the extra cost.
A double standard also exists for GIs of wine and spirits. While countries are permitted to label rice as “basmati-style” or “American-grown Basmati”, no wine can even be sold with the word "champagne" on the bottle. No wine can be sold as “Champagne-Style Sparkling Wine” without having baguette thrown at his or her head.
So if anyone can call their rice “basmati”, more "basmati" rices will appear on the market, and competition will increase. What happens then to the Indians who suffer from the loss of the market for their product? There will always be consumers who seek out the heirloom variety, the highest quality, or the luxury item of any foodstuff, but this clientele alone can't sustain the small-scale basmati farmers and their unique, indigenous and culturally important food. Indian producers stand to lose their incomes, their traditional cultures, and their way of life, and consumers stand to lose the quality guarantee that comes with a purchase of true basmati.
There is hope being offered by the EU, which in cooperation with developing countries like India is rallying to implement a registry system for products with recognized Geographical Indications, like basmati. Affluent countries like Canada, China and Australia are very much on the “against” side of this debate. There is as yet no resolution in sight and all the while India’s basmati rice farmers continue to suffer through competition with America’s more affordable, mass-produced, basmati-labeled rice.
The next time you're looking for traditional, quality-guaranteed basmati, check for an indication of the country of origin. If it says Texas, put the rice down and look a little harder for another option. Traditional basmati should be aged, and it should smell like popcorn, even before you cook it. It will probably be more expensive than the other available types of basmati, because of the cost involved in the traditional, small-scale production, but it’s the real, traditional, culturally-rooted deal.
Further Reading:
Much Depends On Dinner by Margaret Visser
What's In A Name? - The Economics, Law and Politics of Geographical
Indications For Foods and Beverages by Tim Josling
Geographical Indications and The Trade Related Property Rights Agreement: A
Case Study of Basmati Rice Exports by Kranti Mulik
How To Make Perfect Basmati Rice
My favourite Indian cookbook, Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking, has four basic rice recipes. Four! That doesn't even include the spiced rice recipes like rice with peas, pullaos, and one authentically elaborate recipe for biryani. Just as every good French chef can make broth, every good Indian chef (and most Indian mothers) can make perfect rice, but I am not an Indian chef or mother. I needed Ms. Jaffrey's traditional basmati recipe planted directly in front of me the entire time.
What you'll need:
3 cups Indian Aged Basmati
A lot of water (4 cups for the cooking, 7 1/2 cups for soaking, and a whole lot more for rinsing the rice)
Since I needed all the help I could get, I knew I had to start with the best rice I could find - Indian 6-year Aged Basmati from Rube's in the basement of Toronto's St. Lawrence Market. There were so many kinds of rice, but when I smelled the aged basmati, I knew that was the one I needed. The aromatic was incredible - delicious popcorn. I happily brought it home, after being congratulated by Rube for making a good rice choice. I put my 3 cups of rice in a pot, covered it with water and gently moved the rice kernels around with my hand until the water turned cloudy. The polish on basmati rice is there to act like a kind of preservative, to allow the rice to age without going bad. So you need to wash it 4 or 5 times, until the water is clear after swirling it around with your fingers. I poured off the water into a strainer (to catch the escaping rice), returned the draft-dodgers to the pot, added more water, swirled, strained, added water, swirled, strained, repeated, repeated, repeated. Patience…
Then I added the 7 1/2 cups of water to the drained rice in the pot and let it soak for 30 minutes. This is the magical step that keeps the rice grains separate when they cook. After the 30 minutes I drained the rice one last time.
Back into the large pot went the adequately drained rice and the final 4 cups of water. I brought the pot to a boil, covered it with a lid, turned the heat to VERY low (as the recipe emphatically instructed) and cooked it for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes I lifted the lid to fluff the rice with a fork, only to discover that the rice was starting to stick to the bottom of the pot! I got scared. That wasn't supposed to happen to my perfect rice! It was still supposed to cook for another 5 to 10 minutes, covered, before it would be ready!
What should I do? What should I do!
Well, I had 3 options. I could:
A) Add more water
B) Turn off the heat now, set the rice aside, and eat it as it was, maybe a little under-cooked
C) Do exactly what the recipe said and put it back on low heat for another 5-10 minutes, fully expecting the rice on the bottom of the pot to burn
I took the first option of adding more water and letting the rice cook another 5 to 10 minutes, thereby destroying the perfect fluffy texture of the rice and turning it into a dense mass of mushy (way past sticky) rice. This option seemed like a good idea because probably the rice needed more time to actually cook thoroughly, so it needed more water to absorb. Probably the heat had been too high during the initial cooking (despite being VERY low) and the water that the rice was supposed to absorb had just evaporated. Option A was the easy way out. It was the easiest clean-up and the only guarantee that I'd actually end up with fully-cooked rice. Unfortunately, the rice became mushy and stuck together in big, wobbling jello-like tower of rice when I scooped it out of the pot. I resigned myself to my mushy fate and broke it up with a spatula. I could have cut it into geometric shapes, it was so gelatinous. In spite of everything I'd ended up with sticky rice, but worse, so I knew no Indian Chef would be proud of me. No Japanese or Thai either. If I were a newlywed, dense mounds of rice-glue would have been torpedoed at my head as punishment. If I had been serving grilled fish or meat on top, I would have been in trouble, since my jello rice mistake would have been obvious, and more importantly, unappetizing. The nice thing about Indian cooking, however, is that despite all the care put into making perfect rice, often a thick, rich, and spicy sauce will mask your mistakes. Good company also makes a difference, since everyone who ate my not-so-perfect basmati was too Canadian and too polite to be offended by, or to insult, my poor rice-cooking skills.
Next time I will turn the heat to VERY, VERY low, fluff my not burning rice with a fork, and let it cook the last 10 minutes without being drowned in emergency water, and when I take it off the very, very low heat, it will be perfect.
Serves 10-12.
If you read French check out the Rue Frontenac article by Marie-Eve Fournier on le Marché Claude Plouffe, one of the former market stores, now moved across the street to rue Amherst south of Ontario. Ever had a lease that was supposed to run until a certain date and then you get notice that you have a year to get out? Sucks when it's your apartment, but it also sucks when it's your business. Moving fees are not included in the less-than-polite upheaval.
Criteria: Freshness, Variety, Price, Atmosphere, Accompaniments, Drink Pairing, and "Because Sometimes All You Need is a Good Shuck". A grand total of 13 different kinds of oysters, 4 glasses of wine, 3 days, and 1 very, very long night of oyster crawling later, here are the results...
Best Accompaniments or Presentation: Le Club Chasse et Pêche
Runner-Up: Horseradish at Joe Beef
Atmosphere: L'Orignal
Liverpool House next door is also owned by McMillan and there's more space and a relaxed atmosphere that seemed much more appealing. You might not get the furry buffalo or the Newfoundland fishing boat door in the bathroom, but next time I'll reserve a highly-coveted seat at the Liverpool House bar instead and hope for some other decorative whimsy in the washroom. 
Drink Pairing: Le Club Chasse et Pêche
POP Montreal has already started, and while 
Everyone's Organics: Traditional oats and honey without the preservatives and oils of the granola bar aisle in your average grocery store. They're Canadian, so if you aren't making your own at home (see below), and you want to eat a few bars in the evening instead of rationing one of the more intense bars above, these are a good option. Dancing burns a whole lot of calories, but a dance marathon is not a road-race marathon, so these will do you just fine.
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