Joe Philippines: All About the Rice

This is a new post created just about all things rice, a subject I hadn't written about before.

In all my trips to the Philippines, my best photos to describe rice farming can be found in these two woefully inadequate photographs. It is inexcusable and yet I shall make two excuses. The first excuse is that I spend most of my time up in the mountains of the Philippines and not in the lowlands where the rice is farmed. The second excuse is anytime we are in the lowlands, we are there in the dark hours of the day or in a hurry to get where we are going and so I am limited to quick point and shoot from the hip type photos as we fly by and if we just happened to be in the area of some of the planting or harvesting going on. So I will try to describe it to the best of my ability.

From the above picture, you can see the typical paddy layout in the lowlands. The paddies are generally fairly small in size and have built up dikes around the perimeter so that the paddies can be flooded individually before planting. They also form convenient "fences" between properties and footpaths to get from your property home or to the nearest road. Occasionally you will see a shelter built up at an intersection of dike walls to provide shade for a worker on break from planting or harvesting.

The paddies are flooded for a period of time before planting. I assume this is to soften up the earth for the next step is to till the earth and water into a pudding like consistency. To till, they sometimes use their local called the caribou which looks like a cross between a cow and a bison, or they use a kuliglig. 
 

A kuliglig is best described as a hand tractor and you can see one pulling a cart and two people above. It is essentially a motor on two wheels with long handles. Behind it you can attach a tiller attachment or hook up a trailer and drive yourself around. At the time it was quite novel to me but now many years later, I have my own version for use in the garden though I have never hooked a trailer to it and rode around and the only attachment I have for it is a tiller.

Once the mud is stirred up enough, the farmers bring in flats of rice shoots that they started growing somewhere else or purchased. The shoots are perhaps six inches tall at that point and what happens next happens in a flash. The farmer will gather up a bundle in their hand and with a rapid fire motion, poke the root end into the mud which is thick enough to hold it upright. They will walk along doing this over the entire paddy in what must be back breaking work, literally. 

Once planted, the rice is left to grow as the mud dries up. I can't recall ever seeing an actual harvest going on in all my time there. I'm not sure how it is actually done. What I have seen though is the rice piled up on the asphalt highway edges to dry in the sun and cause those of us plying the highways to swerve around them or any caribou being let to or from the fields. 

All this rice ends up in markets and although I thought I took a picture of it once, I can't locate it now. At a market, one will find a rice vender and there will be dozens of varieties of rice in heaping boxes on display. To me, they all look the same but to the choosey Filipino, they are most definitely not all the same. They will go around looking at the various boxes of rice, occasionally scooping up some in their palm for closer inspection and to smell before making their purchase. It will be scooped up into a plastic bag and taken home for that meal. Sometimes they will buy it in large fabric bags that are then dumped into dispensers back home for easy access. 

As you would expect, rice makes up every meal in the Philippines. Indeed, they will often say that if they eat something without rice, it is merienda which in essence means a light meal or in American parlance, a snack. Kanin, or rice as we know it, is generally cooked in pots on the stove though in more modern times, many use rice cookers. The rice is scooped into the vessel and rinsed a couple times to remove a lot of the starch. Then water is added and measured using their fingers. They will stick a finger into the rice in the bottom of the pan and measure the depth of the rice. Then they will add water so when the same finger is used to just touch the top of the rice in the water, that the water level comes up to the same spot on their finger as the rice initially did. This ensure enough water has been added though for fresh rice, you might want to subtract some and for older rice, you may want to add a bit more in order to get great results. 

This Filipino tradition still lives on in our household and we go through a 50 lb bag of rice and most of another probably every year. Both of our kids are very skilled about measuring the right amount of water using the finger method and cooking it using our rice cooker. I on the other hand, am still not the best. I'm just too heavy handed and thick fingered to get an accurate measurement and whether I can tell the difference or not, I am usually told that my rice needed less or more water added. I'm okay with that.