(lively music)
Sawaddee Ka.
- Welcome to a very special episode of Hot Thai Kitchen.
So I just came back from a trip to Thailand,
but this was not a regular trip.
I was on a special mission.
So the Thai Trade Center invited me,
along with a couple of journalists
on this fantastic trip that looks at the journey of rice
from paddy to table.
I was super excited about this trip before I went,
but by the time I was done with it,
I was just absolutely blown away
at all the different things that I learned.
It was such a cool experience, and I'm so excited
to be able to share this with you
in this special video.
So to start out the trip,
we went to a province of Suphanburi,
which is not too far out of Bangkok,
and we went to this place that was so fascinating,
and we got to see the very beginning
of the journey of rice.
Let's take a look.
So I'm here at a place called Na Here Chai
in the Suphanburi province.
Now, this place, I don't really know too much about it,
but I know that it's a learning center about rice.
So I am here to learn about how rice is grown,
and apparently it's supposed to be pretty hands-on,
but I really have no idea what to expect,
so this is gonna be fun.
At first I wasn't quite sure what this place was exactly.
There were some traditional Thai buildings,
but also some sort of a factory,
or maybe a warehouse, and of course,
lots and lots of rice.
Loads of rice.
Now, what I did know and was excited about
was that I would get to do some hands-on rice planting.
But first, we got on a brief introductory tour,
led by Here Chai himself, who is the owner of this place.
It doesn't look like much here,
but what's behind me are trays
that the little seedlings have dropped into,
and check this out!
This is a tiny little rice grain
that's just sprouted.
This is like the babiest of baby rice.
Next comes the best part.
We're heading to a miniature rice paddy,
and yes, this is where I would get to
some actual rice planting for the first
and probably the only time in my life.
Look at this.
Rice!
On the plant.
I've never seen one.
I've never touched one until today.
I've seen pictures of it on rice bags.
Look at that.
Look how beautiful this is.
All right, my uniform has arrived.
I gotta put my farmer hat on and my big boots.
My farmer boots.
Wow, these fit better.
(speaks in foreign language)
- [Woman] That's more fashionable.
- It's been a long time since somebody tied my laces for me.
Ta-da!
I'm ready to go (laughs).
I am so excited, you have no idea.
I've always seen this, like I don't know,
on TV, in documentaries, and now
I'm about to experience it firsthand.
(speaks in foreign language)
Oh, so apparently, they do it bare feet.
I'm just a princess.
So these are the rice seedlings that
have been grown separately,
and now they've grown to the right age,
they get planted into this muddy paddy here.
(screams)
So that mud was a lot deeper than I thought,
and really hard to walk in in those boots.
No wonder farmers actually go bare feet.
The planting itself was pretty straightforward.
Stick each rice plant into the mud in nice, neat rows,
and then smooth everything out to cover the hole.
This is a very strange feeling on my hands right now.
It's soft and smooth.
If any of you have ever put, like, mud masks on your face,
that's kind of like this.
I am never throwing away a single grain of rice ever again.
Ta-da!
(laughs)
I grew rice, ladies and gentlemen.
I really need a round of applause for all of this.
Oh, my gosh, was that an experience!
That was so much fun.
And it's a lot of work.
But people used to do this for a living
all day, day-in, day-out.
I mean, nowadays they have trucks and things
that do this for you in neat rows.
Man, that's a mess.
But back in the day, this is what
people did eight hours a day just to grow rice.
This is how you really appreciate your food.
After that, we headed to this beautiful, carpet-like
vast field of baby rice plants.
And turns out this is actually Here Chai's main business.
Look at this.
It's literally a carpet of rice.
So this is the seedling, and now
they have a machine, like a big tractor
that separates all of these into tiny little bunches
and then they place those little bunches in the paddies,
so basically what I was doing with my hand,
now they have a machine to do all of that.
Look, the watering machine's here.
So what they do here is they actually grow the seedlings
for various farmers.
So they will sell (speaks in foreign language).
So they will sell these seedlings
for all the farmers in this form,
and they just roll it up like carpet and transport it.
But the highlight for me were these adorable buffalos!
Here Chai actually keeps them here to represent
pre-tractor times, when buffalos were used
to plow rice paddies.
This is the female.
Her name is Wen.
So all this was good and fun,
but it still left me a little confused
as to what this place actually is.
It's a learning center, it's a bit of a museum,
it's also a rice nursery, so I chatted with Here Chai
to find out what is the story behind this place.
So he explained to me that back in the day,
he just sold seedlings.
He developed different rice varieties,
and he sold them to farmers,
but as he became more and more successful,
he started to realize that there
was a lot of knowledge that he collected.
A lot of farming techniques, just know-hows in general
about rice farming.
But there was nowhere to spread that knowledge
and to pass it on to other farmers.
So he wanted to start a learning center
to serve that need.
Today, Here Chai opens up to the public
and also accepts field trips,
because he recognizes that knowledge about rice
is so core to the Thai way of life,
since rice really is the lifeblood of Thai people.
Now, in Thailand, we have a saying
that rice farmers are the backbone of our country.
And it is absolutely true.
Especially before the age of machinery,
when that's how hard they had to work all day
to get rice on our table,
and we eat a lot of rice.
I mean, it is our number one sustenance,
so definitely have a newfound
appreciation for their hard work.
So from the farm, the rice gets dried and then milled,
so that part we didn't get to see,
'cause apparently it only happens
during certain times of the year,
but we got to see what I think is
a really interesting part of this whole process,
so our next stop is a rice processing plant.
See, I always thought that rice just
gets milled, bagged, and off it goes
to the store, but apparently not,
because I am standing here at a processing plant
where they deal with the rice
between the milling and the bagging process.
I have no idea what happens here,
so let's go find out together.
This plant is called Siam Grains,
and it's located in the suburb of Bangkok.
We were first introduced to the manager
and our guide, Mr. Kittipan.
We started with an introductory video,
and then Mr. Kittipan pointed out
that just outside our window
are the trucks full of rice
that have just arrived from the mill.
And the first thing they do is they poke each bag of rice
with this massive needle that sucks up a sample of rice
into the plant for quality control.
This right here is the first step of quality control.
So the rice just got vacuumed.
That's where they all ended up.
So they're looking for, first of all, moisture content.
If the moisture content is above 14%,
they reject it and they send it back,
because if it's too moist, it'll actually get mold on it,
and the second thing is they sort of just,
as you can see, rice all over the table.
They sort of scatter the rice on the table
and just take a look at its overall appearance.
Does it look good?
You know, does it look like nice, healthy rice?
And the third thing is they look for yellow grains.
So there are usually a few yellow grains,
which she said is usually rice that's too old or whatever.
I'm not entirely sure,
but it's rice that they do not want,
and if they look in this, they see
that this lot has far too many yellow grains,
they reject the whole lot.
There's a lot of different, tiny little details
that go into this quality control process.
After the rice gets through
that preliminary sorting process,
half of it goes up to the lab for,
you know, things that requires lab
for further QC, and the other half, it's really interesting,
gets cooked in these cute little rice cookers behind me.
I love it.
And they cook every single batch of rice
to make sure that it's up to standard.
This is the lab I was talking about.
Here, the rice goes through a much more rigorous testing
of moisture content, of the whiteness of the rice,
and also of purity, which basically looks at
how much of this jasmine rice
is actually not jasmine rice?
Turns out that some contamination
of other white rice is inevitable,
but if it's not at least 92% jasmine, they reject the lot.
So we're gonna now go in and take
a closer look at the processing,
but I'm looking at this pile of rice here,
and I recognize it.
I can get that at my local supermarket.
The place is massive, and the first thing
that hits you as you walk in is the smell of rice.
Yep, there's definitely a lot of rice in here.
The rice first goes through a machine
that sifts out little stones
that's left over from the milling process,
because apparently, some rice mills
use stones to mill their rice.
And then the rice gets polished
for that nice, shiny appearance that you see at the store.
But the really impressive thing was
the next station that he showed me.
So this is the coolest part of this whole process.
It's a color sorter.
Basically, there's a camera that's
looking at all the rice that's pouring through,
and if it catches anything that doesn't look like rice,
basically, any yellowing grains,
pieces of plastic, of glass, or anything
that could've contaminated it,
it uses wind to blow it all out,
so that at the end,
the only thing that comes through is rice.
How cool is that?
Look at this.
This is all the rice that went through the color sorter,
so you can see it's all the yellow and white
and all the imperfect grains came out.
And after all the sifting and the polishing and the sorting,
the rice is finally ready to be bagged.
But it's not quite done yet.
The bags then go through a metal detector
to see if there's any teeny-tiny bits of metal
that might have slipped through the cracks.
Then and only then are the bags ready to be shipped out.
And this giant claw right here basically puts the rice
on the pallet, and then off it goes
into the truck, into the containers, and look at that.
How cool is that?
And it just senses the presence of the rice,
and off it goes.
Who knew so much had to happen to rice
even after it's been milled
before it could end up on our store shelves, right?
Now, when I was at Siam Grains,
I thought the place was huge,
and I had never seen so much rice in my life.
But that was about to change,
because our next stop was in the province of Ayutthaya
at the CP Processing Plant.
I am now standing in front of the biggest
rice processing plant in the world.
This place processes over a million tons of rice a year.
A million!
And this place is so big, it's even got its own port,
and from here, rice gets shipped either domestically
or it goes to another port
where it will ship all over the world.
So the rice you're having could be coming from right here.
And just so you get an idea of how large this operation is,
they have a command center.
I know!
A command center for rice.
And from this room, they can keep track
of every single step of the process,
not just at this plant, but also
at their other plants around the country.
You know, what fascinated me about this place
isn't so much what they do, because fundamentally,
they do the same thing as Siam Grains does.
But what's remarkable about it is the scale.
When I say that this place processes
a million tons of rice a year,
to put that into perspective,
that is 15 billion cups of cooked rice.
15 billion meals
come out of this place every single year.
Now, that was a lot of rice.
And I had no idea rice could be
such a technologically advanced operation.
I mean, when I was in that command center,
I felt like I was at NASA or something.
And you know, when all was said and done,
when we concluded the trip, the thing
that was going through my mind at the time was that
I have cooked thousands of batches of rice in my life, easy.
And it had never occurred to me that the reason why
there's no, not even a tiny little rock,
a tiny bit of hay, no dirt, no nothing,
and the reason why it's so white and fluffy
every single time, like that doesn't happen naturally.
Or easily, for that matter.
I mean, it takes a lot of work and attention to detail
from people like Here Chai, who develops a good variety,
and then from people at the processing plant,
who clearly take no shortcuts to make sure
the rice is absolutely perfect.
So I hope you enjoyed this trip
and learned from it as much as I did.
Definitely let me know your thoughts in the comments below,
and if you haven't subscribed to this show,
please do so, so you never miss an episode,
and I will see you next time.
Sawaddee Ka
(lively music)