3 ms·

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 do

by yongjik 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.

by yongjik 12y ago

smcl 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.