Cooks who want to eat trendy grains—and yes, there is such a thing as a trendy grain—have one question they come up against again and again: Does quinoa need to be rinsed before cooking?
The whole debate started thanks to saponin, a naturally occurring chemical that coats every tiny grain of quinoa. It's there for good reason—to ward off insects—but it has a strong, unpleasant taste. Rinsing the quinoa gets rid of the saponin and thus its bitter flavor—great. But rinsing quinoa is also annoying. It also makes toasting your quinoa impossible—unless you want to wait hours and hours for your quinoa to dry.
The good news is that grain expert and cookbook author, and avid Instagrammer Maria Speck doesn't think rinsing is necessary.
"I almost never rinse my grains," Speck says. "I’ve been eating grains my whole life, and I’ve never seen such clean grains as the ones sold today."
Much of the quinoa that is sold in the States is pre-washed before it's packaged (brands often slap the term "pre-washed" on the bag itself). But that's a little misleading. "It’s often not washed with water," Speck says. Rather, the quinoa has "undergone an abrasion process" that removes the saponin.
The "clean" quinoa does comes with a nutritional cost, though. The abrasion process "shaves off a bit of the beneficial bran layer and germ from each kernel," Speck says. That makes the quinoa slightly less nutritious than it would be otherwise.
"Still, it's still a very nutritious grain," says Speck—and knowing that I don't have to rinse it first means I'll probably cook even more of it than I used too.
