Converted = Parboiled Rice....Food for Thought

Well you learn something new everyday......and today was no exception.  Last night I was working on the up coming Cooks Challenge and wanted to prepare my Aunt Lucille's delicious Rice Pilaf for a side dish.....but when I pulled out the box of Uncle Ben's Converted Rice which the recipe calls for.......it was near empty.  So I ended up making something else.  Later, I started to wonder if the bag of parboiled rice I had in the cupboard would do as a substitute......in fact might they be the same thing???.  I had purchased it to make a coconut milk chicken curry recipe I acquired from an African cooking course I went to in the Spring and it has been sitting in the cupboard along side Uncle Ben.  Well it turns out I could have used the parboiled rice....because converted rice= parboiled rice.  Who would have know???  Obviously not me!  And with instruction from the African cooking course, I went looking for this 'parboiled rice' in the dollar store where they had purchased theirs from.  So I'm glad to say that instead of spending over $4 on a box of Uncle Ben's......now I know where to find it for $1.50.  I also learned that parboiled or converted rice is more nutritious than white rice.....if I got it right....the parboiling process is done with the rice husk still on and some of the nutrients from the husk are absorbed into the rice.  So....I really did learn something new today:)

According to the Cook's Thesaurus:

converted rice = parboiled rice  Notes:   This is a good compromise between nutritious brown rice and tender, fast-cooking white rice.  Converted rice is steamed before it's husked, a process that causes the grains to absorb many of the nutrients from the husk.  When cooked, the grains are more nutritious, firmer, and less clingy than white rice grains.   Uncle Ben's is a well-known brand.  Substitutes:  brown rice (more nutritious, takes longer to cook) OR white rice (less nutritious, stickier, takes less time to cook)