3 ms·

I wonder why barley was/is considered a downscale grain compared to rice?

• staunch 11y ago
  Roman legionaries also disliked being being forced to eat barley and meat, but in lieu of wheat. A lot of it must be to do with taste and quality, but also a desire to not eat like a poor person or barbarian.
• jcl 11y ago
  It's because polished white rice took more effort to make, so it was more expensive, so it became associated with the upper classes and success. http://ask.metafilter.com/149004/History-of-white-not-wholegrain-rice-in-Japan http://ask.metafilter.com/149004/History-of-white-not-wholeg...
  • lifeformed 11y ago
    Plus white rice tastes better.
• yongjik 11y ago
  Try making a "rice bowl" with 100% barley and you will understand. It will taste horrible. (A little bit of mixed barley (and other grains) is fine, but it doesn't take a huge leap to see why people would prefer pure rice.)
  • smcl 11y ago
    Whoah hold up, barley being considered horrible seems like a cultural thing. Certainly in Scotland and Czech barley/kroupy is considered a damn tasty ingredient, I even use it in place of Risotto rice (I acknowledge that it's not the same thing as a rice bowl)
    • yongjik 11y ago
      Well, it's cultural in the sense how you cook rice or barley is cultural, but if you cook 100% barley in the way you cook rice in Japan (or Korea), most people will agree that it objectively tastes worse. (Well, I guess the way some people refuse to have even 5% barley is probably cultural...) I can't speak for Japan, but in case of Korea, generally people don't consider barley horrible. They just find it a bad substitute for rice.
      • eitally 11y ago
        I think your last sentence is the one you might have led with in your previous comment. Barley is perfectly good, prepared plain or in other dishes. It just isn't rice and anyone expecting rice and receiving barley would likely be horrifically disappointed. I know I would (and I love barley and almost never eat rice)!
  • jpindar 11y ago
    What? I occasionally make barley in the same way I would rice, and it tastes fine. I add some salt, butter and other flavorings, but I do that for rice (or noodles, or potatoes) too.
  • lsc 11y ago
    Hah. It's funny how cultural taste is. Me? I strongly prefer barley to rice, and brown rice to white rice. White rice is... comparatively quite plain, to my palette. Sure, I'll eat some, especially if there is some sauce or something to put on it... it's not offensive, but there isn't a lot of flavour, and the texture is comparatively uninteresting. Barley, on the other hand, has a very interesting, rich texture, and a nice nutty flavour. I will eat a bunch of barley. As a kid, my parents would make me Mochi. They were hippies, so it was the brown rice mochi. Lately, I've been craving the stuff, and every time I ask my asian friends, they get me white rice based mochi, a very different (and in my opinion, much less flavorful) food. I eventually figured out where I could mail-order the brown rice mochi from. So good! but, again, made for hippies, so unlike the white rice mochi, which comes in individual plastic packs, this stuff comes in big sheets you need to cut up. Hippies. grumble. But yeah, I think a lot of this is just cultural factors. I can't imagine eating tofu with nutritional yeast if I didn't have it for breakfast nearly every day of my childhood. Or nutritional yeast at all, for that matter. That stuff looks like fish food, and really, what else do you put in your mouth that is that color? But it's so good on popcorn.
• ars 11y ago
  Historically barely was always considered animal fodder, not human food.