The Epic Story of Rice: Gods, Conquests, and a Food Trip Through History

[Music] I probably don't need to tell you what this is half of the people on this planet eat at least a bowl of it every single day rice is the staple for civilizations from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean China to West Africa and wherever it's grown it doesn't just provide nutrition it forms the backbone of entire culinary cultures this simple grain has built Empires led to the establishment of cities and been the cause of everything from diplomatic feuds to full-on Wars its cultivation was the single most important moment in the history of Agriculture and yet somehow it manages to be everywhere and still overlooked taken for granted never given the credit it's actually due so today on OTR we're out to change that to trace its incredible path and wait into its long and often controversial history and of course to try some of the best versions of the world's most ancient and enduring rice dishes this is the story of [Music] rice there's a legend told in The Villages of Vietnam that a very long time ago there were no such things as grains of rice instead every night rice would grow to the size of basketballs and each morning piles of them would proudly roll themselves towards every house and wait outside the front door for the family to wake up ready to eat humans thanks to Rice had everything they needed and all rice asked in exchange was a little bit of gratitude a simple thank you in the form of some decorations left outside to show appreciation so the people would decorate their houses with tributes to the friendly rice but one night a farmer ate too much and fell asleep forgetting to display his sacred Shrine to the rice Gods this was a sign that humans had begun to take their Bounty for granted so in Anger they shrunk down to a tiny size and decided to stay put out in the fields from then on wherever rice would grow it would be up to the farmers to do the work themselves or go hungry this is just one of the countless origin stories and legends about the creation of rice found in the oral histories of cultures from one side of the planet to the other because for so much of the world wherever you find life well if you go back far enough you find rice since the beginning of time in this part of the world rice has been everything the very Foundation of society and the staple crop that allowed cities to form and caused Empires to rise and fall today across the planet 14% of every crop pulled from the ground is a rice stalk and if you put all the rice fields together it would make the 13th largest country on Earth a billion people on this planet make a living from planting harvesting packing shipping or selling rice from Asia to the Americas and almost everywhere in between with the plant itself cultivated from the lowest points below sea level to the mountains of the Himalayas it can be grown on water in the fields or even high up in the mountains where there is rice there are people throughout history the rice plant has been used to make clothes and insulation paper and even particle board in ancient Korea it was used as currency for paying taxes and today it might even rescue your cell phone rice is used for preservation for adding strength to concrete and for fermenting into alcohol but of course most of all it's used as food with as much as half of the world's population consuming at least a bowl of rice every single day now all right this is a story about history and as hard as it might be to Fathom there is always the first in this case someone somewhere who became the first person to ever plant and cook some rice the tiny act that would change everything and that's usually how these videos begin but let me issue a caveat finding Origins is always going to be complicated not necessarily because the evidence is hard to follow if you cut through the nonsense there's usually a decent Trail you can follow that leads somewhere before anywhere else but the problem when it comes to rice is how much nonsense they're actually is mainly because this has become an existential battle for national pride I mean the concept of food Wars isn't new like there's stuff like french fries kimchi and hummus where multiple countries make a claim but this is rice it's different so with that said before we get to our first meal let's start by going back to the very beginning and waiting into a fight that's divided the world [Music] all right before we get into speculation let's start with facts first the consumption of rice is very very old and second rice is a grass and before it was first domesticated variations of wild rice grew across much of the world but with that said let's begin with the generally accepted point of origin for the use of rice as a food source which is China's yti river valley specifically here in the area between today's Ningbo and Hong Joo at dig sites dating to as far back as 12,000 BC or 8,000 years before the invention of the wheel and 2,000 years prior to the fictional lives of The Flintstones anyway this evidence is generally based on Rice having famously been found in storage basins however what's not as widely known is that Rice was just a small component of giant pots filled mostly with nuts and acorns which probably not definitely but most likely means that Rice wasn't actually that widely accepted accessible or in other words it wasn't being farmed yet just foraged let me digress for a second to explain something about how rice Works basically the rice we eat is the seed of the plant and grasses have this thing they do in nature called shattering what it means is that when the seed becomes ripe it falls off that's how the species survives but when something that's just ripe and falls off it kind of ruins the idea of farming so at some point I mean thousands and thousands of years after people fill those basins in China we see a genetic shift all of a sudden the fossilized samples archaeologists found starting around 5,000 BC had a mutated Gene one that would stop the plant from shattering and therefore allow farming this would have been incredibly difficult I mean it took as long as 8,000 years to be achieved it would be perhaps the most significant breakthrough in global farming history and that's not an exaggeration but as for where it happened well that's when we start getting into the controversy the oldest fossilized remains of non-shattering rice were actually not found in China but in India where rice consumption also dates back to the beginning of the written record now Indian legends claim that rice has been consumed in the country since at least 13,000 BC although with no evidence to support it it feels like that number might have been chosen only because it's older than what they found in China but it is without question that r place also has an ancient history in India it's closely linked to many of the country's great religions and those claims are also backed up by archaeology the Indian and Chinese strains of rice are two distinct variations known as Japonica and indica however they both belong to the same species oriza sativa and both possess the exact same non-shattering gene evolved identically so scientists have come to generally agree that it would be impossible for them not to come um from the same Source it had to start somewhere now since scientists first started studying this topic both countries have put a lot of money into commissioning research backing their own origin claims which makes finding truth in the history books a complete mess there are tons of studies from China which show irrefutable evidence of the Chinese origin and just as many from India proving with certainty that they were the ones who made the Breakthrough maybe the best actual clue comes from an American research team that in 2011 did a full genome mapping of more than a 100 types of Indian and Chinese rice and determined that the actual point of origin based on genetic comparisons with wild rice wasn't from the banks of the yangsi or the ganji instead it was the flood Plaines of the Pearl River delta in China's South close to Hong Kong according to that theory the rice from there would make its way across China and by land to India along the way being cross spread with local endemic varietals anyway one last point on the topic which may or may not be relevant but in 2003 a team of archaeologists in Korea announced that they'd found evidence that Rice actually originated there as far back as 15,000 BC jumping the line even ahead of China and India the studies flew in Fast and Furious from both of those countries with literally thousands of papers discrediting the Korean claim successfully by the way as by now it's almost completely forgotten at least China and India can work together sometimes anyway regardless of where rice started as soon as Farmers figured out how to grow it while towns started forming then cities here was something so abundant so resilient that it literally took Asian Society from hunter gatherers to Urban dwellers which finally brings us to our first meal the earliest versions of rice eaten whether in China India or Korea wouldn't look that different to how you might typically see it today some steamed rice along with a protein or maybe some simple vegetables but around 1,000 BC we start to see the first culinary breakthroughs the use of rice as a component in a complete dish what we find at the very beginning is something incredibly simple made with just rice and water created after a flood to stretch a limited Supply further but as far as we know it's the world's first rice recipe a dish from China known as Joe so all right Michelin rated Joe restaurant although realistically Joe is Joe it's uh rice cooked until it's a soup um the texture if you've never had it before is kind of like oatmeal um you can make it as thick or as thin as you see fit although um this is pretty standard it's kind of you know right in the middle the whole idea is just to stretch rice further and in this case uh put a couple of classic components in it um the more elegant famous Joel restaurants will serve it with seafood especially in South China here I just have uh sundried pork and Century egg which are both uh preserved ingredients that would have been in a classic Joe uh at least as far as we know a really long time ago and we got it on the side with y uh thank you very much otherwise known as patongo here in Thailand which secretly is kind of what this is really all [Music] about the genius of course of Joe is that it stretches a limited supply of rice further a way to save a population dependent on rice from starvation when there's not enough to go around Joe also known as kanji or here in Thailand joke is is said to have been created in China during the Joe Dynasty the name is probably just a coincidence around 1,000 BC now the Joe ruled from what's now Sian and they pretty much base much of their rule on Rice they claimed to be descended from a man named ho g a figure from Chinese mythology who was and this is hilarious if you've ever dealt with Chinese bureaucracy an administrator a prehistoric minister of Agriculture who was revered for giving the Middle Kingdom rice and through the spread of Joe the Joe Dynasty could claim to oversee an Empire that was almost immune to famine it wouldn't take long for Joe to spread wherever there was rice and to become revered as almost a miracle you can find it in ancient recipes in Southeast Asia Japan and Korea and also of course in the Indian subcontinent where it was used not just as food but as traditional medicine and where we get the name kanji a TL word meaning boiling and to this day in the same region where it first emerged it's an everyday breakfast staple never really thought about this but since we're on camera and I have to look okay eating Joe with with a mustache is is really causing me some trouble [Music] all right between the Advent of non-shattering rice the fast expansion of rice across Asia and the introduction of dishes like Joe to make rice drought prooof the thousand years before the year zero would see an explosion in both rice consumption and also more and more new recipes New Uses of rice adapted to local pallets in those here we see the first example of sushi made in Japan something called nushi Fish and Rice pickled together in salt said to have originated around the year 300 BC it's the time frame in India when we see the birth of something called Kier basically joob but cooked in milk and sugar instead of water seasoned with cardamom and topped with nuts and almost definitely the world's first sweet rice dish and it's around the same time as the Chin Dynasty the first to unify China saw Northerners from non- rice growing regions move South where they began to make their own staple noodles from Rice instead of wheat but those noodles while they would spread around much of the world well they weren't technically the first rice noodles because long before those show up another group of people from China had settled the Basin of the irati river in what today is Myanmar bringing rice farming to Southeast Asia and putting their stamp on Cuisine through their own signature dish these were a people known as the m and what they made brings us to the next part of this story now we've talked at length about the M on this channel as they were massively influential in the origins of Southeast Asia but basically they were rice farmers who swept down from the young sea River Valley around 3500 BC it's true that pretty much every civilization from this region would develop their own techniques and varietal of rice but the first to sew the land to plant the seeds literally and figuratively were the ethnic M it's the M who introduced the region to irrigation and rice cultivation and while they didn't leave a lot of records behind we can follow their spread through two paths their language and their most famous dish something that would become a staple of ancient civilizations from the Lana na to the cham it was made by Milling rice into flour and then making it into a dough fermented in the tropical heat for preservation and then forced through small holes directly into boiling water it's a technique still followed today an essential part of the cuisine in Thailand Cambodia Lao and Vietnam and even as far away as Sri Lanka and Southern India the mon called it hanin the root of the thae name conom jein like Joe it was most likely developed to stretch a rice Harvest even farther something critical here in the floodlands and with the added benefit of tasting really really good its history predates almost anything else still found in Southeast Asia food or otherwise and where it started today's Myanmar it's still the national dish served in a soup made of fish stock in aromatics something found in every corner of the country there it's known as a dish called MinGa this is like the ultimate Burmese breakfast food it's salty you know it's a fish stock uh you have the chickpea fritters because it's from Myanmar which means there's going to be some kind of textural contrast uh egg fish cake uh and long beans some cilantro or coriander if you prefer and the soup with some chili on top and uh yeah this is just this is just one of my all-time favorite things it's a lot of people's favorite thing this is a very popular [Music] dish we did a whole video about these noodles these rice noodles that like you can see them all across southeast Asia Thailand it's kin Cambodia it's Numan chuk Vietnam it's bu and the whole point is that like wherever you see this that's where the ethnic man once settled these are probably we don't know for sure there's some disagreement in South China but probably the first rice noodles that were ever made and uh it has you know a history that's a lot older than any kind of modern Southeast Asian society and it helps it is absolutely [Music] delicious it's also pretty light which I'm thankful for with the amount of eating that we have ahead of us I'm already getting full by the year 500 BC rice was found pretty much everywhere in the eastern half of Asia and I mean everywhere from the southernmost islands all the way into the Himalayas and maybe the most fun part about tracing it spread isn't really the fundamentals of how it was traded so much as the myths that spring up around its arrival I mean in the eyes of the earliest people something this important had to be a gift from the gods in fact almost every culture and ethnic group in this part of the world has an origin story about this plant and if you'll indulge me just a minute before we get back to the history well these are very much worth acknowledging in China the most common story involves the goddess Guan Yin who you might also remember from our history of oysters it said that she gave her milk and her blood to create the first rice plant with the milk explaining the white color of the grains and the blood the reddish husk around the outside to early Japan it was another goddess Amat tesu omikami who was given grains of rice by a swan flying through heaven and presented them as a gift to the Japanese Islands female deities also play roles in a few ancient stories here in Thailand where according to one Legend a goddess was cursed by the wives of farmers because she was too beautiful and their husbands desired her affection so she hid herself in shame and lived with her best friend a freshwater fish where she would remain until the farmers apologized and as a show of Goodwill she gave them rice maybe my favorite story about the origin of rice comes from Tibet where people once battled starvation as they relied on hunting in a land with few animals one day a dog came running across an empty field and hanging from its tail were clusters of rice seeds which they planted and hunger disappeared versions of this story are found throughout the Himalayas and western China One from the meow people where a dog with nine tails went into heaven to steal a rice plant fighting the Heavenly gods and in the process seeing eight of its Tales cut off before achieving its Mission and returning to Earth with rice which is also the origin story of dogs regardless of which version is told in a community in the region from Sichuan to the Himalayas it's still tradition to give the first cooked handful of that Year's rice Harvest to the family dog a couple more than back to our story in the Philippines there's one legend that says a girl Born Into Slavery named agme was sitting at a river crying tears of sadness when she saw a bundle of golden stalks floating with the current she buried the plant in the mud next to the river and when it grew her family collected the rice and used it to buy their freedom an a Le ocean tale involves a farmer who had no food to eat so he trapped a fish but the fish turned out to be sacred to prevent the fish from being eaten the king of the fishes gave the farmer rice instead rice would become so important and Loud that eventually a king would take all the rice and hoard it in a locked dungeon so a peasant went in search of the rice goddess hacked her into pieces and planted them which gave La countless varieties of the plant white black long grain short grain and sticky rice with so many types of rice now growing the king could no longer control the supply and from then on the people lived in abundance and even though there are countless more well that's as good a segue as any into another important topic which is the diversity of rice itself with so many cultures and so many climates relying on the plant it's not a surprise that this simple grain has evolved in thousands of different ways actually 120,000 different ways that's how many varieties of rice are said to exist today across the planet 20,000 right here in Thailand alone which all evolved from that very first big bang it's a number that might sound crazy I mean it is crazy but to see for ourselves well we had to take a trip to the local market I wonder if the uh I wonder if the ducks and chickens still remember me probably not I don't think they're the same ones [Music] this is ktoy Thailand's largest wet Market in a place we just filmed a couple weeks ago spending 24 hours here without leaving and while then our Focus was on the meats and vegetables this is also where Bangkok shops for Rice there's rice in all forms toasted for use in Ean Cuisine made into konam jeene or MinGa noodles and of course course sold straight from the farm in massive quantities all right we already found our destination we don't need to go beyond this 31 31 types of rice at least and obviously like you know we have the all kinds of different sizes and variations of you know Chinese white rice we have all the Thai Jasmine rice the long grain long grain Tha jasmine rice I think is going to be this uh we have what looks like uh sticky rice so this is going to be the Ean uh sticky rice one two three at a minimum of that we have the unhusked varieties black rice brown rice slightly less brown rice [Music] the diversity of rice on display at a place like clung toy is both impressive and honestly unless you grew up in this culture confusing now we need to get back to the history but before this channel I was a chef and the food side of this needs to be addressed what's the difference between all these variations and how does the choice of rice impact the dishes it's meant to be served with well I can't answer that question but I do know someone who can so for our next meal I set up an appointment with the owner of one of Thailand's best [Music] restaurants this is bondang by methal sorang an offshoot of the Michelin starred place that's often called one of the best Thai restaurants on the planet the third generation owner my friend n agreed to join us to pass along some of his Secrets when it comes to selecting a proper rice to pair with his Cuisine tell me as a thae person how important rice is in the culture in the language of saying like how are you doing essentially right uh it just explained to me about about the importance of rice to somebody in Thailand wow um wow what what what metaphor can I use it's basically the same as just waking up and and breathing I'd say we we eat it every single day I'd say for the typical tie like every day just every day it's an everyday thing for us so it's very [Music] important according to num of all the varietals you'll find at a market there are subtle differences in tastes and textures and certain sizes work better with some dishes but for an educated Shopper what you really pay pay attention to is not just the type of rice but how it's treated after it's been harvested you were telling me off off the air something that's really interesting about aside of choosing what rice you're going to use that I hadn't really considered right so I guess the most common is jasmine rice which we we use here as well but uh what what I've learned throughout uh my career is that um the amount of time for Rice storage before it is uh used used also has also effect of its uses as well uh typically when a rice is stored less give or take less than three months it still has its starch content which makes it more sticky and uh most people use it for let's say joke uh porridge it creates a more like uh sticky uh feeling and then the aroma is going to be nicer however after it's stored later than three months six months or a year with proper storing um it can be more used in a versatile manner for example a fried rice it becomes less starchy less sticky less clumpy that's why it's a bit of a a hidden technique like you don't have to use a day old rice you can use like uh rice that is properly stored for a long time and so it's you just cook it and fry it you just cook it and fry it basically yeah uh what do you choose to use here so here we use a typically 3 to 6 month old rice so it's more versatile use in a restaurant uh Manner and it's for newer rice it's much harder to cook properly cuz sometimes uh it's so easy to overcook it and it becomes this sort of like pasty kind of [Music] feel so you get your rice yeah get your rice thank you and then let's do it here so we can we can if you want to film this from above while we're doing this so basically what what you typically do uh you you get the sauce the the curry and then you you you pour it over the rice and then basically you just do that so the rice absorbs all the flavor and that's how basically we eat uh cow cang all right uh let me eat got to eat I'm sitting here looking at this I got my plate off to the side enjo enjoy yeah thank you so much nice to see you again you're [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome all right to get back to the history we left off around the time the Japanese developed Sushi and the M created rice noodles all using crops and techniques brought from China but not long after that the global rice trade would change with China putting a hard stop on Rice export see China might have become a nation completely dependent on rice but by the time of the tin Dynasty it was already clear that there just wasn't enough to go around they had a growing population to feed and only a small percentage of land suitable for farming so for a long time there would be no more trade in Chinese rights and so this story shifts to India with which was at its peak as the Lynch pin of global culinary Commerce let's start around 500 BC when India was a trading partner of the ancient Persian Empire at some point around that time the Persians began to import quantities of Indian rice the first time that it reached that far to Asia's West rice would become common in Persia with their own agriculture centered around bazra in today's Iraq the Persian Empire wouldn't last much longer it would fall to the Greek under Alexander the Great in the year 330 BC and it was that Conquest that first introduced rice to Europe and the Western World As a matter of fact it's also how we get the word rice from the Greek oriza which was taken from the language of Persia which itself came a very long time ago from India's Southern language of Tamil anyway just because the Persians were growing rice doesn't mean they were using it as a staple food source after all theirs was a baking culture and rice should be steamed something not yet found in West Asia instead as far as we can tell in Persia and later in ancient Greece rice was used for making into flour for desserts and most of all for making beer after rice First shows up in Persia it would be another few centuries before it would become part of their diet and for that well let's go back to China again well maybe not China itself I mean it was close to the rice trade but to the Borderlands where Chinese rice had first spread so long ago one of those neighboring countries to China's West was usbekistan where as far back as the 4th Century ad the people were known to favor a local dish of rice cooked in stock with spices called Hala in Chinese locally pronounced as Pila after the Muslim conquest of Central Asia in the 700s new trade routes would spring up linking the region to the Middle East it was along those paths that P was first introduced from usbekistan to Persia and then during the Mughal Empire from Persia to India where it would become Biryani that dish would change the way rice was consumed in the Middle East and for our next meal well that's where we're headed [Music] in the alleys between Bangkok sukumvit soy 3 and soy 5 there's a neighborhood known as the Arab quarter the home to a densely packed Maze of restaurants run by and servicing people from the Muslim world and one thing those cultures have in common from Morocco to Iraq is the use of rice but nothing draws a crowd like this one one of my favorite dishes served in this city a legendary betterin dish known as monsa [Music] rice all right so I understand that at this stage in the shoot and we this is not a camera trick we've done this all in succession uh having this enormous 10 kilo plate of food is a uh strong choice however uh I mean I don't care what the circumstances are I will always have room for this this is mansaf rice and it is the uh national dish of Jordan um it's found sort of throughout the the Levant region uh Saudi Arabia um Kuwait it's very popular and what it is is basically rice that's cooked uh in a sauce made of yogurt we have more of the yogurt sauce here uh mutton is the meat of choice uh and it's cooked on top of and with uh bread you know which is the flat bread of the Middle East so I'm going to start scooping this and it is just like this is a treat this is the kind of thing me and you know we've never filmed at this restaurant before this is called haed and the restaurant itself is actually Egyptian um but they do have foods from throughout the region and this is the Highlight uh me and Daria actually came here for this off camera like a week ago um and that's something that we do quite frequently whenever we're in the mood um I would say that this is one of our two or three most frequent stops in the whole city uh for a place that we eat regularly off camera um see msof rice it's a dish that has a ton of history I mean like thousands of years of history as a bin dish um the incorporation of rice is more modern it was traditionally mutton yogurt sauce and um and bread uh however rice as a staple grain in the Middle East is also something that has ancient history because of course it does it's rice [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's unbelievable I'm going to just eat because the hair salon across the street is celebrating song crime which is Thai New Year so they were very nice and agreed to turn their like blasting music off for us while we were filming but I told them just a few minutes and then we promise we'll let you get back to your party so I'm going to let them do that because I have work to do there's a lot to eat and uh and talking is just distracting me from the actual Mission unreal all right as long and convoluted as the path of rice is the one thing that's certain the one universal truth is that in ancient history rice grew wild across much of the world before somewhere probably China maybe India after thousands of years of trying breeders were able to crack the genetic code and successfully domesticate rice I mean we covered that right at the beginning and it's the most important thing that might have ever happened in food but it's not the whole story what isn't usually included in the history books is that there was a second domestication half a world away from Asia a second Miracle of Agriculture completely independent from the one that we all know about it happened around 3,500 years ago in Africa and you probably don't know about it because nobody talks about Africa but it happened in what's now the country of Nigeria and for the people there it would be history changing now according to Theory and keep in mind this isn't well documented as the Sahara dried out around 2500 BC the local versions of wild rice which were once abundant across the whole of Africa became in the northern hemisphere harder to find so the people set out to make their own for the record this would happen more than a thousand years before any record of trade between Africa and either China or India in fact a full 1500 years before the first rice was shipped to the port at Alexandria this was something completely different and totally independent unique in global history and the only rice found anywhere on Earth that belongs to a different species than oriza sativa basically we start here in Nigeria and the area we're talking about is here the Delta of the ner River now again this story has to rely on a bit of speculation but the farmers who first managed this incredible accomplishment were most likely from a group of 16 small Clans known as the Volta ner who were pastoral farmers and yet were still according to archaeology Advanced enough that they were smelting metal as early as almost anyone else on Earth and it would take an advanced civilization to have developed this race because it was no joke of an achievement it was sprad in a way that still baffles scientists with a dense canopy that prevents the growth of weeds a faster maturation than that of Asian rice and most significantly the ability to thrive in even the harshest of conditions tolerating bad soil Aid soil and even no soil at all growing literally on top of the water in the Delta Region when this rice by the way was first encountered by European slave Traders they wrote of its impressive nature and described its cultivation as as the most complex they'd ever seen anyway just like in Asia after rice was domesticated it led to the construction of cities with the first recorded a place called el e it was here that the volan ner would consolidate into a tribe known as the Yuba who today number almost 45 million in the Yuba Language by the way the name el e translates to the home of expansion from that new city the domesticated rice would quickly spread across a large swath of West Africa blanketing the coastline and moving Inland as far as Lake Chad it would be this rice that would serve as the staple food for the greatest Empires that region has ever seen beginning with the Mali Kingdom which would spread from the nir Basin to become for a Time the richest civilization on Earth the consumption of rice would also be the Lynch pin of the sonai the great Rivals and eventual successors of the Mali for a time there were number of large kingdoms centered in West Africa all consuming local rights which again means this story is about to get controversial see somewhere in one of those civilizations sometime in the 1500s a dish emerged that would quickly become the single most iconic food of West Africa it was made by cooking rice with onions and tomatoes which had just arrived from the Portuguese now this dish which would be called joloff rice would lead to centuries of intense feuds between West African countries particularly Ghana Nigeria Mali and Sagal as to where it first actually originated and when I say intense I mean this manifested not just in generations of arguments but in more recent years cookoffs articles and even musical battles with rival songs staking their claims to the dish in the end UNESCO got involved and decided the actual credit should go to Sagal which in all honesty should have been obvious from the beginning because the name of of the dish itself comes from the sagales joloff people but I guess it didn't really matter because in West Africa there are so many other preparations using rice including even inversions of the continent's most beloved staple you will allow your water to boil when the water is already boil then you you mix it when you mix it you will use a something like this to turn it turn it until it is done it's it's very easy to do perfect in a back alley across from the Arab quarter above a hair salon behind an unmarked entrance there's bangkok's best West African restaurant it's run by a man named Andy who invited us to visit to show us his famous joloff rice and also how he makes Fufu the Nigerian staple not with the more common cassava but instead using rice for that one bag of flour how much water is in this or you just know you just you don't measure you just know I don't measure I don't measure but I know exactly how how much water can yeah even if uh the the water is too much you still add the rice floor when you are turning it when you are turning it because you have have to put it on fire so that it will it will be done when you see that um it's already thick because you have to make sure that it's a little bit thick then you you will keep the the the reserve water [Music] standby so this is the oil yeah uhuh you add it small pry small so that when customer is eating because we normally eat with hand so when you are eating you know yeah it it will be just smooth and easy because of the oil [Music] like before if I have a big customer this I can make more that is when I need somebody to hold the pot for me well I worked in kitchens for long enough my hands don't get hot I don't have any feeling in my hands anymore you see it's already smooth so it's already done [Music] a Goosey second time we've shown it on the channel but this is this version is just something else and this is why we are here every culture and country that has a history of farming rice you know and in Nigeria it goes back 3,000 4,000 years you know it's such a versatile thing um not necessarily in the climates where it grows but in the uses of it and to be able to substitute the classic um cassava for rice flour is just you and to keep that textural Integrity it's awesome so you make yours a little bit spicy I like that that's that's um if we thought we were starting to get full uh that hit of chili pepper is going to wake us right back up again it's fantastic let's try the rice all right so here the texture of the rice is going to be a little bit different from what we saw for example at bondang when we were kind of looking at the the Tie Way of of making rice and you go to you know how rice is served in China where it's going to be a little bit lighter and fluffier and in this case because of the Tomato that it's stewed in um this has almost a sticky texture it's something that almost feels like it's it's like uh how would you describe this it's like a kind of like a it's more like a risoto than a bowl of Chinese rice uh yeah this is it's fantastic and the cool thing is again such a completely different flavor profile than any anywhere else we've been today just shows the versatility of of rice and the reasons why it's appreciated by people everywhere [Music] [Music] the ancient Nigerian rice is today almost extinct increasingly replaced since the 1970s by the Chinese varietal for the primary reason that it's more cost effective since through genetic engineering it now yields a bigger Harvest but there's a massive Legacy of the African culture of rice not least of which can be found throughout the Caribbean where the first strains planted in the 1560s were brought from Nigeria as a matter of fact more than half of all African slaves were taken from the rice growing region mainly because European slavers found that it was easy to stock up on food supplies for the transatlantic Journey thanks to the abundance of local rice there are even stories in places like Jamaica that said that slaves held in bondage used to hide grains of rice in their clothes and even in their hair so that if they ever became free they could plant their own crop and build a new life and to this day rice is found in pretty much every meal from Jamaica to Trinidad in the Dominican Republic and of course on the continent as well in both North and South America the story of rice in the new world isn't simple or straightforward there are many different points of origin from European trade to the arrival of Indian Plantation workers there's even a theory thus far not proven but also worth observing that it it's possible there could have even been a third domestication event in Brazil around 5,000 years ago using their own strains of wild rice that grew in the Amazon basin what we know for sure is that today rice is a key component in the cuisine of Mexico where it arrived with a Spanish which is why it's sometimes called Spanish rice in Peru where it also came with a Spanish and where a common dish Aros chaa was introduced by the Chinese in the 1800s and takes its name from chaa fun fried rice in Mandarin and it's consumed in Brazil maybe not their own native strains but there you can find white rice brought by the Portuguese and also something called red rice which is the species from West Africa maybe almost gone from its original home but thriving in Brazilian Cuisine and of course there's also the United States and one more time this gets complicated the most common version of the story is that Rice was first cultivated in 1685 in South Carolina using rice seed brought from Madagascar now that Rice was the same that we first find way back at the beginning of this story in China which worked its way to Taiwan was brought to the Philippines by austronesians around 5,000 years ago and then they would introduce it to the islands across the Pacific Madagascar included and it is true that the so-called Carolina rice would become a key crop in the Colonial economy helping Drive the domestic Commerce that would Finance the American Revolution but there's more to it than that and somehow our last story might be the craziest one of this entire video this time for the first time ever on OTR we start in my hometown Charlottesville Virginia in the year 1787 at a place called Montello the home of Thomas Jefferson who 11 years earlier had written the American Declaration of Independence having played a role in uniting the colonies into one brand new country Mr Jefferson had a conundrum which is why America's Main trading partner France refused to buy Carolina rice maybe he thought it was because the American rice wouldn't grow in a more mountainous climate so Jefferson traveled to Italy into the Alps to a region that was growing its own rice and despite an Italian law promising the death penalty to Rice Smugglers he made his way back to the coast with rice seed in his pockets planting this rice at monachello he was disappointed to find out it was exactly the same plant as the varietal from South Carolina so that wasn't it as fate would have it he'd receive a copy of a travelog written by a missionary to Vietnam who described finding rice of the most perfect color and quality so Jefferson decided that would be his next mission to obtain a sample of Vietnamese rice again this led him back to Europe in hopes of enlisting the help of his friend the head of the French navy who often sailed to Vietnam but what Jefferson found was even more exciting see in Paris at the time was the son of the exiled Vietnamese King NN an along with his Guardian Bishop Pierre Pino forced into hiding because of the teson Rebellion literally the subject of our video two weeks ago anyway Jefferson received an audience with the prince who promised to send him a French ship full of rice on his return to his homeland but that would never happen as shortly after Jefferson returned to Virginia the French pulled back their support of the NN family in any way by the time NN an would win his war on his own his son had died of small pox at the age of 21 but Jefferson was now obsessed and he would eventually receive his Asian R not from Vietnam but from Sumatra delivered by none other than Lieutenant William Blye deposed in the Mutiny of the HMS Bounty and left stranded on the island of teamour since Bly could no longer hope to show any success from his mission which had been to deliver bread fruit trees to England he instead wanted to salvage something so he scavenged a small amount of local Indonesian RS after his return to England he'd present that rice to the botanist Joseph Banks who would eventually deliver it all to Jefferson with a note informing him that he just received the entirety of the ill-fated mission of the HMS Bounty however sadly this rice proved unsuccessful growing at monachello and also at the home of Jefferson's friend James Madison the writer of the US Constitution but still all was not lost in the end the success of Jefferson's kihot quest for rice started with a chance meeting in 1789 with a young Bostonian Captain who'd heard about these struggles and offered to help this time by sailing for the west coast of Africa where he said he'd heard of a rice that surpassed all others in both quality and adaptability the Sailor returned a few months later with a 10g drum of r rice purchased from a local farmer in what's now Guinea the western edge of Africa's ancient rice growing region where he divided it into portions and sent them to Growers he'd involved in his quest including of course none other than George Washington who had just begun his first term as the President of the United States now long story slightly shorter the African rice didn't succeed in Virginia but it did in the hills of Georgia so successfully that it would soon spread across the entire southern region of the country and in 1803 after Jefferson himself negotiated the Louisiana Purchase that land including the Delta of the Mississippi River would be populated with the very same African slaves who once they saw this unique red rice well they knew exactly what to do with it and thus a new Cuisine would develop a fusion of influences from the French and Spanish who had previously colonized Louisiana the new American settlers and most of all the cooks from West [Music] Africa all right so uh this is not going to be a struggle for the last meal of the day as full as we are because this is the Taste of Home I'm I'm I'm so excited for this and it smells great like we got the uh jambalaya with andou sausage and Pulp chicken and we have the gumbo which is with seafood shrimp and crab meat both rice based dishes uh from New Orleans and um yeah so usually on the channel when we film at a restaurant that has music playing like this we have to ask them to please uh turn it off for us while we film just because of copyright laws uh it really hurt to make that request here because this is again like Dr John playing in a New Orleans themed restaurant uh Steve Miller Band was the last song that was just on and I have to ask them to please turn it off um but let's give the food a try and then stop talking and also stop eating because uh it's a lot of rice today New Orleans Food is amazing [Music] quite surprised to find a decent version of jambalaya so far away from home it's a little bit sweeter than I would want it but you know that's I guess what the local palette wants it's delicious honestly and the sausage is great [Music] as my initial excitement wears off and I start to realize how much we've actually eaten so far today and how much rice we've eaten so far today I think it's about time to wrap this up both literally and figuratively I'm going to take this away and bring it home for Daria all right for our last bit of rice history we return to where we started with that very first origin story in Vietnam except this time not in ancient history but in the 20th century it's the last years of the colony of French Indochina and in spite of what we all know now was about to happen there was no sign yet that the country was primed for a Communist Revolution hell even hoochi Min was Liv overseas where he'd been for almost 30 years back home the biggest concern wasn't one of politics it was the much more urgent matter of starvation see the French had realized there was a big market for exported rice so they were sending the local stock overseas and at their factories they even burned the Vietnamese rice for fuel when World War II broke out things became dire the Japanese sent an army to take control of Vietnam and to keep them at Bay the French signed a treaty promising ing Japan a million tons of Vietnamese rice per year and then after the two countries entered a sort of shared occupation it got even worse with the Japanese seizing even more food while at the same time forcing subsistence Farmers to switch to military production between 1944 and 1945 a catastrophic famine gripped Vietnam particularly in the north and with hoi men now back in trying to Rally an army he found a winning cause in promising not political change but Rice backed by Legions of rice Farmers his Revolution would pick up support gain Steam and eventually that would lead to everything that came after in other words if the French had simply understood the life or death importance of rice the entire course of modern history might have unfolded differently and it's possible maybe even likely that the Vietnam War would never have happened the truth is there are more stories like this from all throughout history it was a R shortage that led to the fall of the cam rice riots brought down a Japanese government in 1918 and India and Pakistan are embroiled in a bitter Feud over Basmati and that's just the tip of the Riceberg if I have one takeaway from making this video is that there's no way to properly do it justice that's the thing about a subject like rice which is so closely linked to everything from history Commerce and mythology in countries across the planet the closer you look the more layers you find from ancient China to India to well pretty much everywhere today rice is the most widely eaten food on Earth it's grown in 117 of the world's 195 countries and its consumption continues to increase every single year it's thrown at newly married couples at weddings celebrated with festivals across Asia and Africa and used in religious rituals in the Indian subcontinent it provides billions of people with SU Ence and a source of income and is both affordable enough to feed a family and diverse enough to please the best chefs from across the planet rice tells the story of cultures Empires and trade and it's a story that we're still uncovering with new research continuing to broaden our understanding of just how important this simple grain has been since the very beginning of time this might not be a complete narrative there's so much more we could still cover more rebellion and origin Legends and so many more dishes out there for us to try but for now at the very least we can say that this has been our very best attempt at covering the most important story in the history of food the story of rice subscribe to the channel for more from OTR thank you so much to everyone who supports us on patreon it really helps to keep us going find links below to our patreon and social media and we'll see you next [Music] week I mean the concept of food Wars is not new like their stuff like kimchi hummus french fries were French fries I mean the concept I mean the concept of food War is not new like there's stuff like kimchi hummus French all right I mean the concept of I mean the concept of food Wars is not new like let me just take french fries out run burgundy yeah I mean the concept of food Wars isn't new like there's God

Channel: OTR Food & History

Views: 79,051

Keywords: otr, OTR, the history of rice, rice, food history, thai food, chinese food, ancient food, african rice, nigerian food, jollof rice, mansaf rice, thai curry, khao gaeng, jambalaya

Id: 1ivJsV1A5oU

Length: 60min 53sec (3653 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024