Broken Rice

Almost all breakage is inherited rather than created. Fissures set in the kernel during paddy drying — when moisture moved through the grain too abruptly — survive hulling invisibly and then fail under the mechanical stress of whitening. Aggressive hulling and over-milling add to the total, and immature or chalky grains, being weaker, break more readily than sound ones. The mill can protect its whole-grain fraction with careful settings; it cannot recover kernels that were already cracked when they arrived.

Brokens are food, and in many markets are bought as such deliberately rather than as a compromise: they cook faster, they suit porridges and rice puddings, and several cuisines specifically prefer them for particular dishes. Beyond direct eating, they are the natural raw material for rice flour and rice starch, since a product that will be ground has no use for kernel integrity. Brewers rice — a broken fraction used as an adjunct in brewing — is a long-established outlet, as is distilling. Small and fine fragments go to feed and to pet food.

• Food — cooked directly, and preferred for some dishes in several cuisines
• Food and industrial — milled into rice flour and processed for rice starch
• Beverage — brewers rice as a brewing adjunct, and distilling feedstock
• Feed — the finest fractions, into compound feed and pet food

The international trade routinely names milled rice lots by their permitted broken content, and brokens are also blended back into whole rice up to a specified proportion. So the same material is at once a separate product and a component of the primary one, depending on the contract.

Brokens are specified by fragment size fraction and uniformity, by the proportion of fine material and rice flour dust carried with them, and by the usual measures of colour, chalkiness, damage, and freedom from foreign matter. Buyers grinding them into flour care about different things from buyers cooking them, so the specification follows the outlet.

They store much as milled rice does — dry, cool, and protected from storage insects — with the added consideration that their greater surface area per unit weight, and the fines that travel with them, make them slightly more prone to moisture pickup and to attracting infestation than intact grains. Since the bran is gone, they carry the same low oil content and the same freedom from rancidity as the white rice they came from.