Learning to Cook

2012.07.16

Learning to Cook

Today I taught my third class in country. I went over homework from two classes ago and gave students the chance to ask questions about plotting points. At the end, I had them plot points on the blackboard, after which I connected lines to draw an elephant. When they figured out what it was, they were pretty excited. But I don’t want to talk about class, even though it is pretty awesome to teach these kids. I want to talk about rice.

I don’t know about all of Tanzania, but here at my homestay, cooking rice is more than just cooking rice. It’s a process. We get the raw grain, called mchele, and sift through it to remove rocks, chaff, and other inedibles. Sifting, or kupepeta, includes picking out rocks as well as tossing the grain up into the air and catching it again in a special shallow basket. Then the grain is rinsed thoroughly while the fire (usually charcoal) is heating up. After rinsing, we heat up oil in a pot over the fire until it sizzles and then add the rice. The rice is basically stir-fried for a few minutes (I’m still not sure why) before water is added until it is just above the rice. We let this cook for a while, adding more water if necessary. After ten or 20 minutes, the rice is done.

I have personally never seen rice cooked this way before. My first thought was that maybe the oil is to keep the rice from sticking to the pot. This was definitely not the reason because: a) I asked, and b) it didn’t keep anything from sticking. My idea now is that maybe it tastes better…?

It has been really cool to see the different ways of doing things here. It’s not just the tools people have (such as charcoal fires instead of rice-cookers), but other things like frying the uncooked rice that are interesting to learn about. I had thought there was pretty much only one way to cook rice, but they have a saying here along the lines of: there is one kind of rice, but many ways to cook it. I’ll see if I can ask for the quote/proverb.