Dehulling rice is way harder than processing wheat...
Also eating boiled wheat grains was a thing long before bread was figured out.
You can make bread with rice flour too if that's your thing.
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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“Bread” with rice flour, maybe.
My mom has celiac disease and while the options for gluten free bread have gotten a lot better since the 80s she still sneaks a slice of real sourdough because it’s not the same.
You can all tropical cultures have some form of rice bread. Indians have rice bhakhari, South East Asia has rice paper, rice mixed with wheat in banh mi, Liberia and Sierra Leone have ginger rice bread. Its a fundamentally different bread and requires different complimentary food. If you use it as replacement for wheat bread it will not taste the same. Its like you made wheat pilav and then complained its not the same. Of course it's not the same that's the point.
It depends on how we're defining bread, and none of your examples are a leavened loaf. They're just impossible to make without gluten which rice doesn't have. (Hence why they add wheat to make banh mi.)
However, bulgur pilaf is a lot more like a rice pilaf than those breads are like wheat bread.
You can make sourdough from rice that is really really close to the real thing. The basic recipe is this:
- if you want sourdough you need to make a starter, you can use any normal recipe and replace the flour with rice flour or soaked rice that was then blended.
- soak 500g of glutenous rice for 4-12 hours (the longer the better)
- add soaked rice to a high power blender with whatever you want for flavor and texture(ie salt, spices, oil)
- blend while adding water until the blender is able to blend all of the rice properly (will be smooth and probably like a batter, not a dough) do it slowly as to not over do it and get a watery mixture.
- make sure the temperature is ideal for yeast (blend more to heat it up, let it rest to cool down)
- add yeast/starter and blend shortly just to mix it.
- pour the mixture in a loaf pan (about half way to the top) ideally a silicone one as it bonds strongly to everything, if you are not using silicone I would suggest parchment paper
- sprinkle water on top of the batter and let it rise, if done in a cooler temperature(longer time) be sure to sprinkle water every now and again.
- when the batter is close but not yet at the top of the pan, move on to baking.
- sprinkle water on top of the batter again and bake at 170-180c with a pan of boiling water to keep the oven air moist.
- it should be done when it has browned and the inner part has reached at least 98c
- get it out of the pan while it is still hot (easier) and let it cool before slicing.
Some people that have tried it when I made it didn't even realize that it is not wheat.
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Do you know if she's tried Fat Head dough/bread? I'm pretty sure it's gluten free, it was my go-to on keto. Made with mozzarella cheese. It's really, really good.
Rice needs very wet and fairly warm conditions to grow whereas wheat is a cool weather crop and doesn't need as much water
Wait until you learn about the ridiculous hoops you need to jump through to make cocoa or coffee beans into something palatable, especially compared to ~~hot leaf juice~~ tea.
Ayyyyy teaaa gang rise up.
Present and accounted for!
Cacao isn't too bad. Eat the fruit, spit out the seeds into a pile, ferment a few days, roast, peal, grind and you got it. There are some details to the ferment but it's not more complicated than any other ferment d food.
As I understand it, the hard parts are removing the bitterness and getting the texture to be anything other than unpleasantly gritty. The traditional Meso-american cocoa was a spicy bitter drink; what we think of as "chocolate" today wasn't invented until fairly recently and requires a fairly involved process.
I mean I grow it and have taken it to the nib stage and it came out quite tasty. Really not too bad in terms of process. It's a few day/ week of fermentation followed by drying and roasting. I process it a few times a year, when I've got enough to actually process (I only have a handful of cacao trees).
Compared to most of what I grow, which is Vanilla, cacao is a walk in the park. Vanilla requires manual pollination, care monitoring of conditions, and a fermentation and curing process that has many steps, some daily , for months.
The stupid level of processing is...boiling it? Same as rice, people only discover processing it a bit later.
If you think about it then boiling is not that easy.
There is almost no way to boil something until you discover pottery and ceramic, and this is quite advanced tech for many early civilizations.
The Haida on the west coast of Canada put red hot rocks in their canoes to render fish. You underestimate humans ingenuity.
Humans are very clever. Sometimes I feel very clever because I have learned so many cool facts and skills with the internet, and then I think about all the knowledge I hold that people of the past managed to figure out from scratch, and it blows my mind
Wheat doesn't need to be grown in a marsh.
My understanding is that rice doesn't need to be soaking in water, either, but it helps with the weeds, since rice can survive the water but not other plants
Very cool to learn something new! Thanks for informing me homie.
Yeah let me just replace these rolling wheat hills with a rice farm. It'd totally work because wheat and rice have the same growing conditions. Dumbass
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Beer. It was always beer.
How did people who wiped their ass with a communal sponge on a stick figure out beer?
Because someone who is starving to death will eat literally anything.
Someone tried rotten grain and got a buzz and then after surviving the famine went back and figured something out.
Wheat is just fancy grass. People learned how to process wheat before they learned how to wipe their asses with a communal sponge on a stick.
Wheat calories are what unlocked the big brain thinking that first said, "Guys, let's put just ONE sponge on a stick. And share it!"
Rice is just fancy grass, too. So are oats, barley, and rye. All fancy grass
Corn is the fanciest grass
My bamboo fields disagree.
Bamboo is just world dominating grass tbh
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When humanity discovered bread it made their heads and brains smaller. We all need dental work because of bread - our heads are too small for our teeth.
Bread?
Agriculture. Otherwise explain how cultures that cultivate rice or maize or yams where no wheat grows also experienced the same morphological changes.
Wheat was the first farmed plant, about 10k years ago, at least the first we can see in the archaeological record. I shouldn't have said "bread" as that was at least hundreds of years later
I'm not sure whether the Nile region invented bread before they exported farming
My friend. 10K years ago humans already occupied Asia, the Americas, and Southern Africa.
None of them had wheat. But the jaw shrinkage theory applies to them.
How would jaws shrink in MesoAmerica when wheat didn't arrive until 500 years ago?
Cultivated corn.
How did jaws shrink in Asia when wheat was not cultivated widely and was not made into bread?
Cultivated rice.
How did jaws shrink in SubSahan Africa where wheat simply can not grow? 100% of bread made in most African nations is made from imported flour.
Cultivated millet, sorghum, rice, and yams.
Then why would groups that don't have bread, and in many cases have only had access to bread for 4 or 5 generations, experience jaw shrinkage thousands of years ago? There's literally billions of people pointing to the fact that is agriculture.
This isn't conspiracy theory stuff. Even the wiki page says it's agriculture.
It's OK to realize you were told wrong by someone else. It's not your fault. It's not an L, it's learning.
wheat has almost twice as much protein. A wheat-fed peasant, you're probably going to be stronger and healthier than a riice-fed peasant.
Meanwhile the Inca: 🥔
Taters? Boil'em, mash'em, stick'em in a stew?
Also freeze drying them first. Ancient taters were poisonous, since they are nightshade. And freeze drying them would reduce the toxins.
You mean "leave a pile of taters out in the open over night"?
Yeah but if you live high up the Andes it’s basically freeze drying, because of the freezing nights and the high altitude sun during the day.
Exactly what I'm saying! "freeze drying" sounds like a way more involved process than something that just happens on its own if you do nothing.
True but someone had to figure out the process even if it was by accident. Like the first people who tried the first potato species probably didn’t eat them again because they got sick. Until someone ate a potato (against the knowledge of the time) that was left out of the ground over night.
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A person probably made some fermented wheat beverage on accident and thought its worth repeating.
I once made prison wine by accident by leaving a bottle of Coke under my bed for a couple weeks.
I didn’t drink it but it smelled really strong.
Plus rice also needs to be polished, which is a not insignificant amount of processing.
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Because if you let it sprout a bit, then roast it, then boil it, then let it sit...
Well you get beer.
"be wheat" yeah like anyone here has ever been wheat
buncha posers
Processing wheat involves letting it dry and opening both ends of the barn so the hulls blow away.
And rice is extremely laborious to grow.
Wheat is not that difficult to process.
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