 Over 1,000 years ago, the Anishinaabe people lived along the Atlantic coastline of Turtle Island in North America. They were visited by eight prophets and given seven prophecies to follow, the third of which directed them to travel westward until they found a place where food grows on water. When they arrived in the Great Lakes region, they discovered vast beds of wild rice, or manoman. As the story is told, Nanobusu, the cultural hero of the Anishinaabe, was introduced to rice by fortune and by a duck. One evening, Nanobusu returned from hunting, but he had no game. As he came towards his fire, there was a duck sitting on the edge of his kettle of boiling water. After the duck flew away, Nanobusu looked into the kettle and found wild rice floating upon the water. But he did not know what it was. He ate his supper from the kettle and it was the best soup he had ever tasted. Later, he followed in the direction that the duck had taken and came to a lake full of manoman. He saw all kinds of duck and geese and mud hens and all the other water birds eating the grain. After that, when Nanobusu did not kill a deer, he knew where to find food to eat. Manoman, or wild rice, is a gift given to the Anishinaabe from the Creator and is a centerpiece of the nutrition and sustenance for our community. In the earliest of teachings of Ashina-Bag history, there is a reference to wild rice, known as the food which grows upon the water, the food. The ancestors were told to find. Then we would know when to end our migration to the West. It is this profound and historic relationship which is remembered in the wild rice harvest on the White Earth and other reservations. A food which is uniquely ours and a food which is used in our daily lives, our ceremonies, and our thanksgiving feasts. I'm sorry I made you guys suffer through my narration skills, but I thought that was a nice little story to tell. Wild rice is a grain that was used commonly by the Native Americans, the indigenous people to North America. The rice was typically harvested by knocking the seeds from the grass shoots into a canoe as wild rice grows on water. From a nutrient perspective, it is much better than other grains, being higher in protein, minerals, as well as B vitamins. They are similar to oats in a sense, that both oats and wild rice have a unique nutrient profile. Oats also have a much higher vitamin content than other grains, and oats have a particularly high fat content. Now, keep in mind, the caloric expenditure used to gather this rice far exceeds what was needed to hunt animals. So this rice was eaten on special occasions or when hunting was unsuccessful, as spoken about in the story. As with all quality plant foods in our modern world, they tend to be more expensive than animal foods. So why would I spend $10 to $15 a pound on wild rice when I can buy a pound of fatty beef from Frankie's Free Range Meat.com? Because this food, from a culinary perspective, is so interesting and delicious, I decided to show it to you guys. And there are a lot of people that keep asking me about rice or incorporating carbohydrates into the diet. And when you have a plant food grown in a wild environment like this, it creates a truly unique experience. From the flavor to the preparation to even how it looks. This food is unlike anything you have ever tasted before. And keep in mind, all of our hunter-gatherer ancestors incorporated plant foods as a source of energy in their diet. So although it's not an ideal source of nutrition, it was present in all of our past dietary history. So we have wild rice here. Very unique coloring. It's pure black. If you take a look at it, it's a little bit of brown hues here and there. But for the most part, it's just black grains of rice. If you smell this, it smells like where it came from. The earth, like a swamp, like a freshwater swamp. You really smell nature in this rice. And rice is a grass seed. All seeds are high in anti-nutrients, more specifically phytates, phytic acid. Phytic acid is storage for the phosphorus in the plant. And herbivorous animals have enzymes that can break down this phytic acid known as the phytase enzyme. Humans can ferment and cook foods to reduce the phytic acid content. So duck and geese might be eating this food raw. But what we can do is ferment it or boil it, or a combination of both. So here is just regular dried wild rice. I threw some on my Amazon shop for you guys if you want to check it out. It's relatively affordable, but you could probably get 50 pounds of white rice for the same price of a couple of pounds of wild rice. I actually planned on making this video like four months ago. So I have two fermentation bases of wild rice that have been fermenting for four months. I don't think this would be safe or really a good idea to consume at this point. But honestly, if you rinse it off and boil it, it should be good. The reason I fermented this wild rice was to lower the phytic acid content. And over the course of four months, there was little change outside of the first two weeks. In the first two weeks of the fermentation, the rice grains expanded greatly. If you look in here, you know, most of the rice bursted almost as if it was being cooked. So the rice hydrated greatly throughout the fermentation process. And the smell changed a bit. It does not have the same like yeasty and super pungent, whiny aroma of flour. But this is really funky. There's a bit of mold growing on top here. I'm sure you guys could see that. I really don't want to spill this anywhere. But you could see there's like a mold culture growing on top. And it's like a mold culture that smells like swamp. See, imagine that thing floating around in your stomach. So we have this mold culture on top of the wild rice. And yeah, we could just pour this off, rinse off the rice and throw it in the pots of boil. And if you do consume this on a regular basis, I do recommend some type of fermentation to reduce the anti-nutrient content. All you do is put equal parts, water and rice in a jar. Let it sit at room temperature for two weeks and then you can boil it. I'm not going to use these. You know what? You guys probably want to see me use this, so I will. We'll boil both of these. I'll do them in separate batches, obviously. It takes about 45 minutes to cook. You put one part rice to two parts water in a pot. You wait till it gets to a boil and then you cover it and simmer it for 45 minutes to an hour. This rice takes a very long time to cook, upwards of an hour. And that's just to make it soft. So I will see you guys in about an hour and a half, two hours. I will have both of these rice products completely cooked through. So we'll have the regular wild rice and the fermented wild rice and we'll compare how they look, the texture and the flavor. Here we have the fermented rice and there's a bit less water in here because the rice was very well hydrated. What's interesting is that one of those jars had the mold on top, but the other one didn't. So interesting how two rice cultures fermenting in the same temperature had a different bacterial growth. And this is just the regular wild rice. One part rice, about two and a half parts water. I remember cooking this last time and I did have to add a lot more water to it. So this might actually be three or four parts of water over the entire length of the cooking process. This is where you would add a bit of salt to the water. So you definitely want to season this ahead of time and add salt to the rice before you cook it. I'm not going to because we're tasting this from a culinary perspective and I want to give you guys an idea of what it tastes like without salt. So both of these are simmering so I'm going to cover them and lower the heat. And boy there's that fermented rice smell funky. I got a whiff of that. Smells like cheese and rice combined. The rice is done cooking. Here I have the fermented wild rice. It looks a bit mushier, has a very funky smell to it. The regular wild rice looks more as you would expect wild rice to. Has an earthy smell. Very pleasant actually. I'm not really looking forward to trying the fermented one. So you guys might be wondering why consume wild rice? Is there a benefit? It's still a grass seed and all grass seeds are grains. So it's not like wild rice isn't a grain but compared to rice in general, the way it's cultivated there aren't really concerns about pollution or as much mismanagement of the soil and of the area where the rice is grown in. Same thing with wheat. Out of all the carbohydrate sources of grains, wild rice seems like a pretty good bet. So do oats. I think oats and wild rice are probably near the top of the list. Then you would have heirloom varieties of things like rye and wheat. But all of these grains need to be fermented properly in a certain way in order to be consumed. If we were to go into things like sweet potatoes, bananas, fruits, maybe even white rice, each of those foods would have to be addressed on their own and there are pros and cons to each. Sweet potatoes might look really good on paper but if you eat a sweet potato and it comes out looking like a sweet potato and you don't digest it, then obviously this might actually be a better source for you. I think this depends a lot on genetics and ancestry and heritage. So I'm going to take a bite of this for you guys. I really don't want to try this. Why do I do this for you guys? This is so ridiculous. Like three month old fermented rice. What am I doing? Alright, so it's not as bad as I thought it would be. The flavor up front, like the first flavor you get on the palate, it's pretty bad. But then it mellows out and tastes like wild rice normally does. Has like a slightly off taste to it because it was fermenting so long. That would definitely digest better than regular rice, probably more available to the stomach. So let's try the regular rice though. Now this tastes a lot earthier. It really tastes like a swamp, to be honest. And it's actually really good. I don't think there's another plant food that really tastes this good just being cooked like this. A grain that is. Like if you were to take wheat berries and boil them, I don't think they would taste this good. Very complex. The real best flavor to describe this is like earthy, foresty, almost like damp wood. I don't think this form of the rice would digest very well. Very high fiber. Seems like it might cause some issues for some people. So I would definitely be wary when eating this and keep it separate from fat or protein the first time you have it. Even without salt, plain on its own, it has a very unique taste. And if you were to cook this with like chicken broth and add some butter to it, I'm sure it would be amazing. Chicken broth, butter, salt. Overall I feel like this is a pretty good replacement for rice. I don't think wild rice would be a food that our ancestors would have fermented necessarily. I think they would have just boiled it and eaten it in soup. So you can explore the fermentation process to reduce the phytic acid, the anti-nutrient content. But in this case with how the fermented version tastes and from a logistical standpoint it doesn't seem like something that would have been fermented. I would just go with the regular boiled version first if you guys want to try this. As I mentioned earlier, this wild rice is on my Amazon shop. They have it on Amazon. I've seen it in just about every supermarket. So if you want to try this now, you can run out to a supermarket, pick up a bag. As I said, it's usually pretty expensive, like eight or nine dollars for eight ounces. So keep that in mind. Very long cooking time as well. Let me know how you guys like this and what other recipe videos you guys would like to see in the future. I was thinking maybe a healthy pizza recipe, a healthy burger recipe, mainly showing how to make the doughs and the burger buns using a high quality flour. Also maybe like a recipe how to cook moist chicken. I don't know. Let me know what you guys think. But thank you guys for joining me today. If you could please like the video, subscribe and hit that bell icon. Share it if you can. Recently we've launched Frankies Free Range Meat. My goal being to provide you guys with high quality nutrient-dense animal foods at an affordable price. So if you need an accompaniment to your rice or you want to support the future vision of me providing you guys with even high quality plant foods, we're looking to do raw honeycomb, things like this, wild rice, maybe some heirloom varieties of wheat in the future. I want to be able to provide people with high quality plant foods as well, not just animal foods. Although right now animal foods are the priority. We definitely want to do things like this in the future. You can also check out Frankies Naturals, minimal ingredients, minimally processed cosmetic and hygiene products. Go to frankiesfreerangemeat.com to check out the high quality animal foods and frankiesnaturals.com to check out the hygiene and cosmetic products. Thanks again for joining me guys and enjoy the rest of your week.