Cozy Rice

A quasi-fruit sweet made of steamed rice glycated (decomposed into simple sugars) by enzyme created by koji (rice malt). Regarding the name, it’s a play on words koji and cozy. It is basically the same as amazake but not so much water is added as amazeke in general. It is sticker than rice gruel, as stick as rice pudding.

Photo of chocolate taste. You can enjoy adding a variety of taste to cozy rice.

Background of invention

Though rice contains amazing amount of sugar, it is condensed in a highly complex structure called “starch” and human palate cannot sense it sweet. When you chew rice many times, you may sense it faintly sweet thanks to the digestive enzyme (amylase) in your saliva which decomposes starch (complex sugar) into glucose (simple sugar). Since we don’t sense rice sweet, our satisfaction sensor doesn’t kick in no matter how much rice we eat and we end up eating too much, till we experience agonizing full stomach. Then with a while of time lag, the too much taken in complex sugar decomposed in our intestine and absorbed into our blood stream sustains high blood sugar level for an incredibly long time. I confirmed in my case that, when I eat rice as much as I like, the high blood sugar level persisted more than 12 hours, carried over to the next day’s morning.
This is not limited to rice alone but also true for other grains (seeds) including wheat (bread and pasta), and this is the essence of harms brought by carbohydrates which low carb diet promoters point out. The problem is that they deny every kind of sugar including fruits, while all they need is to restrict only starchy foods. Why does human palate get so excited with sweets? Because you are spoiled, a very bad person? No, because our body absolutely needs sugar!
We have been educated to chew foods well. The reason behind this can be that by chewing well, saliva amylase does their work well, we can sense sweetness of sugar in starch and that would lead to our good health. Then I thought that if rice starch is sufficiently broken down by koji amylase before I ate, I could sense the sweetness of sugar in rice well without laboring to chew it many times and the harm of eating rice too much could be moderated. This idea gave a birth to cozy rice. I was also looking for alternative foods to fruits because in the DAMP country Japan, fruits are insanely priced and marketed as “special gifts” for offering to Buddhist altars or visiting a sick person at hospitals.
After introducing cozy rice into our diet, I could confirm some improvement not only by my subjective feelings but also by blood sugar measurements. However, the improvement was not big because koji amylase could not decompose brown (whole) rice well and I could not feel sweetness enough to cease my tendency to overeat. Thus we were forced to make a choice to give up whole food principle and use white rice instead of brown rice. Later invented Cocto-X replaced its role and now cozy rice seldom appears in our diet.

Tool for cozy rice

You can make cozy rice easily with Tanika’s Yogurtia.