Processing Technology of Delicious and Highly Functional Brown Rice in Japan

Brown rice is a healthy staple food raw material rich in nutritional and functional components. However, it has become a bottleneck in consumption and circulation due to its high content of live bacteria, easy breeding of storage pest, and long cooking time. To address these issues, Japan’s Satake Conoration has developed brown rice processing technologies using high-temperature and high-humidity air treatment and superheated steam treatment. After being treated with high-temperature and high-humidity air at 70 ℃ and 98% relative humidity, brown rice not only achieves a sterilization effect, but also converts glutamic acid in the germ into γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), becoming highly functional brown rice rich in GABA content. It can be further processed into products such as germ rice and polished rice with high GABA content. In addition, treating brown rice with superheated steam at 250 ℃ for 5 seconds can improve its cooking properties (shortening soaking time) and taste (making the rice softer), as well as enhance safety (sterilization) and storage stability (insect and egg killing). Currently, highly functional brown rice products produced using the above processing technologies are already circulating in the Japanese market, and it is expected that these products will promote the further popularization of brown rice as a staple food.