Are you people fucking insane?
Beans, man. Fuck rice. Beans are fucking delicious.

If it weren't for wild rice, I'd easily vote for beans as they're generally more hearty and tasty than rice.

But since I was kid I've always liked wild rice. To this day it's one of a few foods that I never quite tire of. Just the texture and the smell, and the taste when cooked to perfection and served with the right amount of butter and soy sauce. My mother is a very good cook and even though we had a wild rice often while I was growing up, I still ate large helpings of it on Thanksgiving, even though there more interesting, far less common foods being served. Wild rice is both a staple and a treat.

Rice it is!

Marsupialized wrote:Are you people fucking insane?
Beans, man. Fuck rice. Beans are fucking delicious.

It's true

This is actually very fucking hard.

Both rule in their own way.

Fuck...rice.

Wild rice is not really "rice" in the true sense of the word. It's a different genus of grass. Related, but different.

Also, I don't think that I could live without beans. Rice can be replaced with other grains (orzo pasta, quinoa, barley, kasha, etc.) but there's no real way to replace beans with something else and there's just so many terrific varieties of beans and ways to enjoy them. Green and yellow beans are in one of my favourite soups, I love kidney and pinto beans in chili, and you can have a burrito without rice but the beans are essential. Hummus rules. Falafel rules.

Beans.

Rice.

Beans are good, but rice is more useful in a meal. Mind you what type of beans in particular? I like beans but rice gets the vote.

Rice.

2207 wrote:Rice.

Beans are good, but rice is more useful in a meal. Mind you what type of beans in particular? I like beans but rice gets the vote.

Rice.

Fucking insanity.

This is like 'What tastes better? Reeses peanut butter cups or crumpled up notebook paper?'

It's an unfair choice. Limited types of rice, relative to so many different types of beans.

Rice can't compete with that.



Bean me.

There are actually quite a few types of rice. Unfortunately, most of it doesn't taste differently from other types and it's more about the properties of the rice plant. For example: tillering properties, "stickability" (important for societies that favour chopsticks and hands as eating utensils), ability to adapt to flooding, etc. The bulk of rice produced in the world tastes fairly similar, though, which is unfortunate.

The IRRI has been doing a fabulous job producing hybrids and varietals of rice that are both affordable and specialized to specific needs and climates. I am especially excited about the U.N.'s involvement in the IRRI projects and the usage of combined fishery/paddy biosynthesis in order to both improve farming methods, help with biological pest control, and fight overfishing through farming certain sustainable fish species in the rice fields. Tilapia, for instance, are a terrific and tasty fish and not all that different from orange roughy, which is very much over-fished and which you should not be purchasing. You can put such fish in rice paddies and they will combat pests and double as a product.

That having been said, I still like beans more.

Rice dishes can range from biryani to risotto to sushi to jambalaya to saffron rice served with picadillo to wild rice and all points in between. You can't do that with frijoles, even though I do love a good 3-bean salad.

Rice wins.