When The Rice Isn't Right

In the beginning of the month, I wrote about being a foreigner in the country you’re living in, and the struggles we have to find ingredients to make dishes from our home country. It can be so frustrating! And well… it happened again!

Yesterday, I was making Arroz Doce 🍚, which literally translates to “sweet rice”. It is a Portuguese rice-pudding-like dessert. It asks for arroz carolino, which is a rice only cultivated in Portugal. That would be quite hard to find, so I checked a Dutch recipe and they said I could use dessert rice instead. I tried it, the taste is there, but the consistency is very far away from what I expected. The grains are so much smaller and it’s barely noticeable it is rice. Next time it’ll be better!

Also, fun fact: Portugal has the highest rice consumption in Europe and we cultivate our own rice. You can read more about it if you’re interested.