$4 Rice Vs. $52 Rice

hey it's andrew stephen and adam before we get started this episode was filmed at the beginning of the year before we started social distancing due to covet 19. yes we are currently still social distancing but we wanted to share these great restaurants with you even though dining out is not the same as it usually is right now today we're doing rice [Music] potentially the most anticipated episode of worth it ever by me okay ah by me but yours truly rice is my favorite carb and potentially my favorite dish and before we get started on today's adventure special thank you to toyota who hooked us up with this highlander to be the new worth mobile this season today on worth it we're going to be trying three rice dishes at three drastically different price points to find out which one is the most worth it at its price i'm thinking about rice you know we've eaten it so many times on this show it's an ingredient it's a dish it can take so many forms say rice and then i'll say a thing rice noodle rice porridge rice pudding rice cake wait reverse it now sticky rice fried rice crispy rice nice rice we're eating it rice okay so where are we going first we're on our way to azuma restaurant we're gonna see owner hideki and general manager hitoshi i'm very excited because this restaurant was actually referred to us by our good friend sean miro he will be joining us for the tasting he said they make the most fantastic unigiri here we are at azuma restaurant with our good friend sean mura so how did it feel recommending a restaurant to worth it it's pretty stressful because you don't know if it's going to be good enough and then also you don't want people to show up and make it harder to get into oh i see you're walking the door and there's a really great energy and vibe to it it's kind of like a cheerless feeling can you tell us a little bit of the background of the zuma we purchased this restaurant 2002. it was owned by a japanese national built by the okamoto family in the early 50s and why has it been important for you guys to maintain this restaurant as an izakaya well we liked it for one izakaya style is the analogous to the spanish tapas lots of little things but in addition to that we have the regular menu items asparagus beef is very popular here sashimi salad and what makes a really good onigiri lice is very important we are using hikari rice simple but tastes really good it's best to start with like a plain onigiri it's just going to be this triangle that's a little bit thick that's like just the right firmness have maybe a little bit of salt and a piece of seaweed but otherwise it's just going to be this nice subtle flavor because it's just straight up rice whoa these are giant so this is their most standard version no filling not grilled rice salt seaweed it does have a satisfying heft it has the weight of a perfectly shaped snowball like i want to throw this to somebody yeah cheers oh the rice is naturally sweet where are you getting sweet are you tasting salt tasting salt am i confused wait adam please confirm for me maybe i'm crazy i have too much seaweed [Laughter] amazing how satisfying it is because it's just it's so few elements it's really satisfying wait eat that now so this is um taco it's like a pickled daikon love that that's sweet i think we're gonna find out in this episode that uh my taste buds are broken so this is the base one to give you yaki on iriaki comes from the verb yaku which means like to grill this is how you get like teriyaki it's how you get okonomiyaki fun fact so what they're gonna do is they're gonna brush it with the soy sauce based sort of mixture then they're gonna be grilling it charred rice is one of my favorite flavors in the world could have salmon salmon's really popular one that's my personal favorite umeboshi is like a pickled plum it contrasts nicely with the rice flavor stephen which one do you want i saw the fish egg on the menu we'll talk about contrast look at that crust and then just the smell you should be getting like this nice toasty yeah yeah cheers yeah i can never get sold wow that's almost like a fried rice rice ball i mean i guess it is if you'll notice in one bite you're getting this crispy outside which is like totally charred to perfection and then inside is still this really nice rice that's taken in the flavor of the soy sauce yeah we just got to the fish egg part yeah very fishy i get it though this is actually amazing it does go with the toasted flavor of the rice very well it's so good considering it is mostly just rice hey not just rice like rice is well right you're just andrew i'm not getting in there no i got you i know what you mean thank you so much to sean for guiding us through our zuma dining experience i hope to go there again with him i know we're about to eat two more amazing rice dishes i have a feeling today they're all my worth at winter you just literally cannot go wrong with rice stephen it's time for a little rice fact and in fact this is going to be a pop quiz rice fact how many cultivated varieties of rice are there in the world oh no take a guess ah this one's hard i'm going to say 12 534 12 000. the answer is 40 000 yeah you know what ah i'll take that it's like i'm living in pokemon red okay i've only explored the 150 kinds of rice my rhizodex is uh it's expanding well to expand our knowledge of distinct and delicious rice types our next restaurant is going to feature a very special type of rice we're now on our way to lakshan where we're going to see chef sang yoon and try his heirloom black rice very nice black rice [Music] lakshan was my first traditional restaurant came from a world of very high-end french fine dining loxon is sort of my rendition of how i perceive southeast asia a place that's full of mystery and incredible history and this is where i interpret southeast asia through a very modern lens my rendition of beef and broccoli completely change a dish and we do some things that are very very traditional but there's a lot of things that we use that are tricks we use a lot of modern cooking technique that was not available and it's not traditional we make something called puff beef tendon and it will look like from afar a pork rind but we call it the bovine cousin to the chicharron so i think authentic but not traditional you get a taste of something that is so ancient and it's still incredibly relevant the cuisine would not be possible with only old or only new they they have to harmonize so tell us a little bit about this black heirloom rice dish so the black rice dish is also another mysterious ingredient people used to call it forbidden rice and i was like well why is it forbidden the story is that it was only once available to royalty and if you were just a normal person you weren't allowed to have it although it is not technically forbidden it isn't incredibly widely available even in china so i wanted to make a rice dish that was about the rice itself there's a small amount of cantonese sweet sausage called lemshang the rice is the star of the show and not simply a side i think that's a completely different perspective on rice thing about black rice is it's very forgiving in that it can take on a lot of the heat from the wok black rice actually just gets smokier so you get almost that light scorch that waft of smoke i've actually never seen black rice cooked this way i'm willing to bet this is going to be a completely new experience cheers even [Music] mmm whoa yeah it's a nice chewy green yes chewy wow i thought i was an expert on rice i don't know you've been stumped by rice how do you describe that texture it's springy bouncy like seedy almost mm-hmm i want to buy this rice i'm going to find out where they get this they have a guy i want that guy get me that guy you want to have some egg with it now now this is what i like to see now that is the familiar taste i know and love but then earthy nutty herbaceous other rice flavor i notice every single grain of rice when i eat it each grain holds up by itself all of the uh other stuff in this dish stay very separate until you get a bite from them yeah you're eating it oh this is good whoa that's also good when i saw this bowl of rice my like mind it gets stuck it's like you're looking at a image in negative like why is the white part black actually like i shouldn't be eating it i guess that's why it's called the forbidden rice gosh what a flavorful grain of rice i think it has made me reconsider my own personal rice options at home so used to just getting the one i grew up on but i think it's time to start buying other bags of rice so we've had two savory rice dishes our last rice dish is actually going to be a dessert but before we get there it's time for one more rice fact while the great wall of china was being built in the 15th and 16th centuries workers used a porch made of calcium carbonate and rice as a mortar to hold the stones together stephen lim loves a good chemical engineering rice fact [Music] the foundation to my diet and the foundation to a mortar i wonder if people snuck bites of it and inadvertently cemented their stomach shut so we're on our way to our last rice dish we're going to auburn where we're going to speak with chef eric and we're actually going to be eating at the restaurant's bar the dish is white chocolate risotto which is the creation of pastry chef diane also has white truffle on it as somebody who has eaten rice his entire life this will be probably the craziest rice dish i will ever eat auburn is a modern product driven restaurant that looks to deformalize fine dining make it approachable i mean the first thing i noticed was what you're wearing is this your daily work where is this what you're wearing during service it is it is i'll throw in a college shirt at night so deformalizing fine dining what does that mean at auburn to me it means removing the rules typically you go into a fine dining you're told how many horses you need to take everyone takes the same thing so you wanted to deformalize fine dining and then if that's too formal you still have the bar exactly yeah we want to make it energetic for everyone right so where the dining room is tasty menu format the bar is completely out of cart we use the same products just in a different way so sea bream is a beautiful product this is from japan it's very well treated so it's brought on the boat line caught so the flesh is pristine we really want to highlight the filet in the dining room and then in the bar obviously the collar is typically an off cut more fatty so our bar gives us the ability to offer that to guests we're going to be having this risotto which is a dessert it is a dessert it's between a dessert and something savory which makes it very unique and super delicious the white chocolate risotto yes with white truffle i guess i'm just wondering how you came up with this dish we were getting in these beautiful hazelnuts like the best hazelnuts that i've ever tasted and then we were getting in our orders of white truffles we use a very good risotto rice called aquarello after they harvest it they age it for one to three years it enhances the flavor but also it makes it so the rice can absorb as much liquid as possible but still maintaining like the structure of the rice where you cook it and it's not mushy and you eat it and you still feel the individual grains of rice in your mouth while you're chewing it so we're here at the bar of this beautiful restaurant that's behind this wall i like that it's like an unplanned fine dining meal since it's a dessert though we should build up to the experience right so first we're getting the crispy pig ear i grew up in north carolina we have a lot of crispy pork rinds we braise pig's ears for about 12 hours we slice them we dehydrate them and then we fry them and what we get is like a very puffed chicharron we top it with sea salt vinegar powder and fresh black pepper flying in wow chips at a bar i like it strangest texture it reminds me of like a packet of ramen noodles before you boil it yes cheers okay [Music] wow wow i could just eat that forever the vinegar kind of like tastes sweet against all the other stuff happening that's crazy whoa and this is kind of like a salt and vinegar chip but on kind of like a porky puff it's scary because uh we got some shrapnel flying off the mouth there the sea beam color is very unique smaller delicious we cure it in a mixture of salt sugar and citrus fern citrus and fish go really well together in california here we have very unique citrus called finger lime it looks like little caviar pearls so we come up with a little bit of spice a lot of acidity a little bit of funk it's not dressed it's very simply put on a plate cheers oh god oh when fish is good it is the best meat oh my gosh [Music] oh yeah oh man okay that's heaven i could eat 30 of these why would you want to order a dessert dish of all things that has white truffle well i think if you're really interested in food and you want to try something that you haven't tried before it would naturally speak to you i think it's just something you're gonna have to try and you guys should just let me know okay at first i thought huh smells like uh kind of a nutty dessert and now i'm back into huh it smells like i'm about to eat pasta i i feel like the world just you know when like there's a portal we're at the portal about to step into another realm yeah all right stephen let's step into that realm here's stephen to the portal we go oh um i feel like my muscles when i eat this are just expanding and i want to stretch and i don't know what's causing that feeling this is really good it's a lot sweeter than i thought it was going to be i thought the truffle was going to overpower all the sweetness that happened the rice pudding behind i'm getting yeah it is like a very nice rice pudding it's very comforting yeah the truffle is not that weird in here i think it shares a nightiness with the hazelnut which shares a butteriness with the white chocolate which goes with the vanilla broth that the risotto was cooked in it's actually not very crazy at all that's one of the most intelligent things you've ever seen on this show well done i i can't get over the idea that i'm just eating a truffled rice krispie treat porridge rice krispie treat with truffle it's so good there's no moment of like i'm confused by what i'm eating but maybe it makes sense it's just like immediately delicious i am completely satisfied with that rice journey it was a very satisfying day of eating rice what was your favorite thing of the episode that wasn't right my favorite part of the episode where we talk about not the food the design of auburn it reminds me of some danish alternate life that i'll never get to live how about you my answer is tea salad at lakshan salad salad was maybe the best thing at luxon whoa bold words yeah all right andrew which one was your worth it winner my worth at winner is gonna go to luxon that black heirloom rice is so unique it tastes so delicious and different you know what's crazy is that i'm about to choose uh something and that leaves out the other one yeah and i can't believe that other one is not either of our worthy winners because my worth it winner goes to azuma the rice ball it is the simplest version of this dish that could have been done my winner does not go to the grilled onigiri oh really it actually goes to the plain rice ball the simplicity of it cannot be beaten but i can't believe auburn is neither because that was spectacular auburn is really next level adam what was your worth of winner adam says auburn man auburn was so good next we're going on a little road trip out of la road trip [Music] you

Channel: BuzzFeedVideo

Views: 3,178,566

Rating: 4.9336162 out of 5

Keywords: buzzfeed, buzzfeedvideo, buzzfeed video, Worth It, BuzzFeed Worth It, BuzzFeed Steven, BuzzFeed Adam, BuzzFeed Andrew, Steven Lim, Adam Bianchi, Cameraguy, andrew ilnyckyi, Food, Travel, Cheap vs. expensive, Lifestyle, BuzzFeed, BuzzFeedvideo, Experience, cheap vs expensive food, cheap vs expensive rice, best rice in LA, best rice dishes, PL-WorthIt-S8, food, taste test, expensive, cheap food, $ vs $$$, andrew ilnyckyj, foodies, food review, high vs low, expensive food, PL-WorthIt

Id: fYVouIyOXC0

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2020