Bhutanese red rice
Encyclopedia
Bhutanese red rice is a medium-grain rice
Rice
Rice is the seed of the monocot plants Oryza sativa or Oryza glaberrima . As a cereal grain, it is the most important staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the West Indies...

 grown in the Kingdom of Bhutan in the eastern Himalayas
Himalayas
The Himalaya Range or Himalaya Mountains Sanskrit: Devanagari: हिमालय, literally "abode of snow"), usually called the Himalayas or Himalaya for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau...

. It is the staple rice of the Bhutanese people.

Bhutanese red rice is a red japonica
Japanese rice
Japanese rice, or japonica, is a short-grain variety of rice which is characterized by its unique stickiness and texture. It also comes in a variety called mochigome which is used for making mochi...

 rice. It is semi-milled—some of the reddish bran
Bran
Bran is the hard outer layer of grain and consists of combined aleurone and pericarp. Along with germ, it is an integral part of whole grains, and is often produced as a by-product of milling in the production of refined grains. When bran is removed from grains, the grains lose a portion of their...

 is left on the rice. Because of this, it cooks somewhat faster than an unmilled brown rice
Brown rice
Brown rice is unmilled or partly milled rice, a kind of whole, natural grain. It has a mild nutty flavor, is chewier and more nutritious than white rice, but goes rancid more quickly because the germ—which is removed to make white rice—contains fats that can spoil...

. When cooked, the rice is pale pink, soft and slightly sticky.

This rice became available in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 in the mid-1990s when Lotus Foods
Lotus Foods
Lotus Foods is an El Cerrito, California, company run by Ken Lee and Caryl Levine that works in importing heirloom and exotic rices produced by family farmers. The idea for the company came in 1993 when Lee and Levine took a marketing research trip to China...

began importing it. It is currently the only agricultural product imported from Bhutan.
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