Geschmack: der Kochbeutelreis

Cooking rice in Germany takes some trial and error.  At first, at the supermarket, dictionary in hand, everything seems normal.  Langkornreis, check.  Milchreis - a little weird, but alright.  Sure, it's not basmati rice, and the serving size seems to indicate that Germans eat rice maximum once per month, but the pictures on the boxes seem pretty normal, and how wrong can you go with rice? But, once you've passed the cash register and hauled it all home, you may find yourself with an open box and some bewildering contents.  In most cases, four little plastic perforated baggies, with the rice neatly encased inside them.  This, my friends, is Kochbeutelreis.

Never mind that the serving size within these baggies seems to indicate that Germans use Amnesty International's recommendations for starving children to calculate the size of rice dishes, these cooking bags are strange.  When I opened my first box of rice packed with Kochbeutel, or cooking baggies, I, naturally, googled to see if I could cook the rice normally, without the cumbersome bag.  Germans, it seems, have the opposite question, because the answers I found on the internet were to the honest question, is it possible to cook rice without a Kochbeutel? At last, another cultural paradigm shift.

Of course, the answer is yes.  Inside the perforated bag is rice, plain and simple.  But, why do Germans do this?  Why cook your rice inside plastic that you then have to cut your food out of in order to serve?  What is the benefit to Kochbeutelreis?  Apparently, the rice burns less often, because you can cook it in a large pot of water rather than matching the water level to the exact amount of rice that you are cooking, a calculation that, if you're distracted by kitchen cleanup or the latest Tatort, leads so often to disaster.  Secondly, the Kochbeutel is there all the better to trap the wonderful vitamins in rice inside the mesh and ensure they are not thrown out with the bathwater.  Of course, if you are cooking rice the normal way, there is no bathwater to speak of, as it is sucked into the rice anyway.  I'm sure that, if the Germans insist on doing it, there must be better reasons.

To add to the riddle, be aware that while not all rice is Kochbeutelreis, any rice can be packaged neatly in Kochbeutel.  It's not always clear what you're getting, either.  A wrong turn, of course, is not the end of the world.  All you have to do is snip the rice out of the little baggies, or try your hand at rice cookery, German style.