Faux-Asian Wild Rice and Vegetable Stew

Our household was in need of some hot comfort food last night, and a wild rice stew seemed like a good choice.

There are three species of American wild rice, but only Zizania aquatica and Zizania palustris are cultivated.  Z. texana is an endangered Texas species.  All of these are annual flowering aquatic grasses in the family of true grasses, Poaceae.  Just as with the more familiar Asian rice (Oryza sativa), the wild rice grain is the edible seed of the plant.  Wild rice is the only cultivated grain native to the continental United States, and, as a true grass, it is the New World’s only cultivated cereal other than corn. (Amaranth, cassava, and quinoa being non-grass grains, or pseudocereals.)

Cultivation of wild rice is a twentieth-century phenomenon, prompted by revived interest in the grain as a food source.  However, the grain was and still is gathered from Zizania plants by native Americans in the Great Lakes region, using two-person canoe teams gathering along freshwater shorelines and stream banks.

Starting Point: Guy Fieri’s Creamy Wild Rice

Wild rice often appears as a component in bagged or boxed rice blends, but most supermarkets now also carry a brand of pure wild rice.  I found Reese products at my local Dierbergs and picked up two 2.75 oz. boxes of their Quick Cooking Minnesota Rice, as I was motivated by a need for a short boiling time.  (Uncooked rice takes about 30 to 45 minutes to boil.)

The two boxes yielded around 4 cups of cooked rice, which was just about right for a double batch of the original recipe.  Red bell peppers and crimini mushrooms are native to the Americas, but the other vegetables required a little substitution.  The ramp or wild leek (Allium tricoccum) is a native substitute for the conventional bulb onion, but it’s rare to find it in produce aisles.  I used green onions, which approximate the ramp’s flavor.  (In future batches, I’m considering using a little garlic as well.)

I used jicama for both the carrots and celery.  Also known as the “Mexican potato,” this is the tuber from the yam bean plant (Pachyrhizus erosus).  Jicama seems to be enjoying some popularity right now as a component in Mexican American cooking, as it can be found in some mainstream supermarkets.  (I found mine at Dierbergs.)  Jicama is a bit tougher to peel than your typical potato, owing to the roughness of the skin and the size of the root.  Per Jack Bishop’s recommendation, I also took off the very outer layer of flesh, which tends to be fibrous.  The flesh underneath is reminiscent of a potato, but more watery and less starchy, with a little bit of a carrot-like odor.

I wanted to prepare this stew as a hearty main dish rather than a side, so I went heavier on the vegetables than the original recipe, using about 50% more than called for in a double batch (e.g., 3 tablespoons of bell pepper instead of 2).  I sautéed the veggies in sunflower oil and added salt and cayenne pepper, skipping the black pepper.

Heavy cream presents a challenge when cooking from American origin.  The best substitution in vegan cooking is unsweetened coconut milk.  Coconuts are natural globe-trotters even without direct dispersal by humankind, but it’s debatable whether the plant was distributed in the Americas prior to European contact.  Regardless, there aren’t many good substitutes for the richness of cream.  On the positive side, I surmised that the combination of rice, vegetables, cayenne pepper, and coconut milk would lend the dish a pleasant Asian quality.   So Delicious Unsweetened Coconut Milk was my choice.

After adding the milk and cooked rice, I cooked everything for an additional 8 minutes or so, skipped the mustard and parsley, and served.  The result was in fact something closer to an Asian soup or stew than a creamy side dish, with a thick mound of rice and vegetables in a “broth” of coconut milk, oil, and hot spice.  Very good, and very filling.

Wild rice is typically harvested in September in the Great Lakes region, so this dish is appropriate for seasonal eating in autumn.

Update 4/23/11: I made a second batch of this dish last weekend. I used standard dry wild rice instead of quick rice, cooking it for about an hour.  I also used a bit more rice, so it soaked up the coconut milk better.  It made the resulting dish a little less soup-like and more like a grain-and-vegetable entree or side.  I also cheated a little on the origin for the second batch, adding black pepper and two tablespoons of spicy brown mustard for variety.  It turned out really well and fed me for the rest of the week.