Sake Rice: Can You Really Eat It?

In general, people don’t eat sake sakamai (酒米), or sake rice. Its hard exterior means it won’t break down when milled extensively, as is called for when brewing highly polished ginjō and daiginjō sakes. Yet its relative soft heart makes it accessible to the long hyphae, or arms of the kōji mold, which will set in motion the conversion of starch to sugar.

The hard outer shell of sake rice means that even steamed, sake rice tends to be dry and hard compared to the soft, fluffy stickiness of table rice. Since it’s both less appealing to Japanese palates and more expensive, you typically don’t see restaurants or home cooks serving dishes that feature sake rice. At least not until recently.

On my last trip to Japan, I came across many examples of sake rice being served at the table as eating rice. Usually it was at sake-centric izakaya where it was a way to tell the story of the rice and honor the growers. So at the wonderful Bakushuan in Nihonbashi there were onigiri rice balls made with unpolished Toku A (e.g. the best of the best available) Yamada Nishiki rice from Hyōgo Prefecture. They were nutty and delicious, like something you’d eat at a natural foods restaurant. But virtually all Toku A Yamada Nishiki is locked up through longstanding relationships between farmer and brewer. So how did this restaurant get its hands on the rice?

The usual way—they know a farmer (not to mention many brewers) and so a 10-kilo bag somehow found its way to Nihonbashi.

A few days later, after a visit to Tonoike Sake Brewery in Tochigi Prefecture, president Shigeki Tonoike took us to his favorite Utsunomiya izakaya, Kokushu no Shiwaza. There, chef Katsumi Shimoju offered up a homestyle, sinus-clearing dish of pickled Shizuoka wasabi greens over steamed Omachi rice. Omachi is the super-popular heirloom rice of Okayama Prefecture, which we’ll be writing about in our book.

And then somewhere along the way, I picked up two 300-gram packs of sakamai, both of them from Yamagata Prefecture. One was Dewasansan and the other Dewanosato. “Dewa” was the name of the ancient province that once included present-day Yamagata so you see it a lot in Yamagata (think Dewazakura Brewery) . Yamagata brewer Tomonobu Mitobe of Mitobe Brewery explained that these were “educational, fun products,” meant to teach consumers a thing or two about the differences between sake and table rice. The Dewasansan rice was definitely harder, dryer and less sticky than regular rice. But when I steamed the Dewanosato rice, maybe it was a fluke of the day’s humidity, or the amount of water I added to the rice cooker, but it tasted softer and fluffier, more like table rice.

These experiences came back to me when I read recently that the Covid-19 pandemic has forced at least one brewer to try to sell premium sake rice as table rice. The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that after sales dropped by 50 percent in the wake of the global pandemic, the mighty Asahi Shuzō, the maker of Dassai sake, has started selling its premium Yamada Nishiki as table rice. The farmers, too are suffering a flood of canceled orders for the next brewing season.

I hope that the Japanese public is open minded and generous enough to give this sake rice, which is not really to their taste, a try. Asahi suggests using it in risottos or fried rice, where stickiness is not really a prerequisite—good idea. If you happen to be in Japan, give it a try!

If you like this blog post, click here to sign up to receive future posts in your mailbox!