This 1940s Convenience Reshaped American Cooking — And It's Still Going Strong

Four score and four years ago (or thereabouts), a product landed on the shelves of grocery stores across the United States that would change dinner forever. No longer would careworn homemakers fret over the stove for 20 or 30 minutes in order to bring the starch to the table. No, in the early 1940s, instant rice was born through the Minute Rice brand, a staple grain that has been giving precious time back to the evenings of home cooks ever since.

Minute Rice was first produced by a man named Ataullah K. Ozai‐Durrani. The cousin of the king of Afghanistan, Ozai-Durrani originally came to the U.S. in 1923 to study petrochemistry. However, he quickly turned his intellect toward grains and began experimenting with rice in his kitchen. Eventually, as his tests and trials progressed, Ozai-Durrani enlisted the help of the Arkansas Rice Growers Cooperative to provide laboratory space.

It took him nearly two decades in total, but in 1941, Ozai-Durrani strolled into the General Foods Corporation (now a part of The Kraft Heinz Company), set up a stove, and boiled up a pot of his magic rice in record time. The demonstration did the trick, and not long after, the company began shipping this new time-saving grain — which quickly became one of the top food trends of the decade. Of course, Minute Rice (and instant rice in general) only grew from there, and the brand remains popular even to this day.

When it comes to the different types of rice out there, most are differentiated by breeding. You have your long grains and your short grains, white, brown, and black, all of them separated by geography and generations of careful cultivation. But what separates Minute Rice from the rest is all about preparation — and science. Most rice that you buy at the store has been threshed and winnowed to separate the grain from the chaff, then dried and milled to remove the husk and bran — and that's about it. That bag of rice you buy at the store has gone through a few steps, but it is essentially just cleaned-up and dried rice grains. Instant rice like Minute Rice, on the other hand, goes through a couple more processes before it hits the shelf.

The real trick of Minute Rice is that after the initial processing, it is partially cooked and then dried out again. This partial cooking does a few important things, namely partially gelatinizing the starch and creating cracks that increase the surface area of each grain of rice. These effects persist through the second round of drying, allowing the rice to be boiled to a fluffy, delicious state in much less time. These days, there are a wide variety of instant rice brands out there, with varying techniques and products ranging from instant rice (which actually takes about 5 minutes to boil) to microwaveable pouches that are ready in just 90 seconds. But you can't go wrong with the 1940s original Minute Rice, which continues to withstand the test of time.