Japan’s climate and natural landscape develop not only the rice, but also the unique way of cooking it and featuring rice as part of a healthful meal.
Rice is easy on the waist
Compared to bread, which is mainly wheat, rice helps slow digestion. The water in rice helps you feel fuller, which can help reduce snacking.
Rice contains carbohydrates, protein, vitamins and minerals in the well balance, it is also a clean energy that can be cooked by just water. Carbohydrates from rice is consumed faster than fat and eating cold rice such as rice balls prevents rapidly spiking up blood sugar levels, and it will control fat accumulation as well.
Benefits of white and brown rice
Omusubi Gonbei has served Omusubi made with white and brown rice since its founding. Brown rice retains its bran layer, which helps give you a sense of fullness and satisfaction without eating too much. The bran contains vitamins, minerals, vegetable fat and dietary fiber. We have a special way of cooking brown rice, so if you’ve never tried it, we hope you will enjoy ours.
If you’re not a fan of brown rice, we suggest you eat our white rice that is easier to digest. so that we can expedite the consumption more.
As you see brown rice will germinate if it is soaked in water for a long time, brown rice is actually a seed. So eating brown rice would mean intaking rice as a whole live organism. We have our own special way to cook brown rice so that we can share the benefits of eating brown rice with our customers.
On the other hand, we also go to great lengths when cooking our white rice. White rice also has benefits as it’s easier to eat and digest. It still has vitamins and minerals, although not quite as much as in brown rice.
We suggest you to focus on not only nourishment, but also joy to choose which one to eat today and we believe that makes you more healthy both physically and mentally.
A grain well-adapted to Japan’s climate, natural landscape and food culture
Japan’s natural landscape has less flat topographical lands and rivers are precipitous. Our ancestors were plagued by floods and summer droughts. They built low dams across rivers, waterways and ricefields as a way to control and maintain the water supply and for food production.
In order to protect the rice seedlings from low temperatures and damage caused by birds in early spring and to increase productivity, a technique was developed so that seedlings are grown to a certain size before being transplanted into ricefields.
Growing wheat or other crops repeatedly in the same place will cause the “harm of continuous cropping.” That’s not the case with rice because the soil conditions keep changing through irrigation and the replacement of the water in the ricefields.
Since nearly 70% of the national land in Japan is occupied by forests and its flat areas are limited, rice has higher productivity and is better adapted to Japan than wheat. As the saying “one grain ten thousand times” goes, one grain of paddy produces enough rice to hang down the head of the ear. Paddy cultivation has created terrain, developed culture and connected lives. Rice is literally the “root of life.”
In addition, the abundant rainfall has lower amounts of minerals (soft water), and supports not only rice cultivation but also the culture of cooking rice.
Rice has also established the culture of Japanese cuisine centered on rice and miso soup.
Protein and fat were not plentiful in the early days of Japan, so they created miso (a preserved food made from soybeans), koji (yeast prepared from rice or barley) and salt, and the combination of rice and miso soup was born. A Japanese meal of rice, soybeans, vegetables and fish together make a balanced meal filled with carbohydrates, protein, vitamins and fat.
So while we create Omusubi, we look at the big picture: the whole food culture that Omusubi are centered on.
