Once you get far enough into an heirloom bean habit, it stops staying contained to beans. Beans, rice, corn, and squash have been grown and eaten together for generations, and once that clicked for me, I wanted to work my way through all of those categories, not just the bean aisle. Rice felt like the natural next stop. I've always loved wild rice blends, so when I came across Scarlet Rice from Foodocracy, a red grain I'd seen around but never actually cooked, it felt like an easy yes.
Scarlet Rice comes from Two Brooks Rice, a farm run by a tenth generation farming family in Sumner, Mississippi, right in the Delta. What drew me in past the color was how they grow it. The farm uses no-till methods and skips synthetic pesticides, leaning instead on overwintering waterfowl to work the soil naturally through the off season. The farmer has talked about watching the birds, the eagles, and the deer population all increase once they backed off tillage, and using that shift as the reason to keep rebuilding the soil biology rather than reach for more inputs. It's the kind of grain where the farming story ends up being just as interesting as what shows up on the plate.
Texture and flavor wise, this rice is dense and distinctly nutty, more assertive than any rice I'd had before. I cooked it in my rice cooker on the brown rice setting with a pinch of sea salt and a drizzle of olive oil, and on its own it came out a touch dry. A finishing drizzle of roasted garlic olive oil and another sprinkle of sea salt fixed that completely, turning it from good into genuinely craveable. I'm firmly in the fan camp. Matt, who leans toward a softer grain, wasn't quite as sold, so this one might come down to personal preference more than most.
The first night, I served it alongside roasted butternut squash, salmon, and an arugula salad, and the grain held its own next to all of it without disappearing into the plate. The leftovers kept working just as hard. One day they became a quick grain bowl for lunch, and another night I stirred in chopped pecans and served it as a side with chicken and another salad. Three very different meals out of one pot, and I didn't get tired of it once.
