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SOME things you don't think about until they change. In this case, they're rice paddles.
Nothing tacky about
More stuff that won't stick
nonstick rice paddlesBy Cynthia Oi
Star-BulletinThe familiar flat pieces of bamboo that flare from handles to wide, rounded, slightly concave heads may be destined for the nostalgia bin as new and improved plastic models muscle into the marketplace.
And while the description "new and improved" is overused in this age of unrestrained consumerism, the latest rice paddles are a great leap forward. Really.
Why? Because rice doesn't stick to them -- not regular rice, not Uncle Ben's, or mochi rice, not fried rice or Thai sticky rice, not cold rice, not mushy rice.
Some might say, big deal, but it is a big deal. Really.
"Because you don't have to scrub them!" said Mildred Spence, a clerk-typist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "It just doesn't stick. At first I didn't believe it, but it works. It's so much easier to clean."
The new paddle sports textured plastic on the business end: either dimples (innies) or pimples (outies). The ones with innies usually come from Japan and those with outies in Korea or Taiwan. Prices run to less than $3 a piece.
Florence Okimoto, vice president of Tanaka Distributors, Inc., which wholesales the paddles to Longs and Foodland, Star and Times supermarkets, said she believes the first of these paddles were brought to the islands last year by a Maui man named Lance Taguchi, although others have said Marukai began selling them in 1999.
When Taguchi contracted with Tanaka to distribute his paddles, sales took off.
That's right, said Bob Skaggs of Longs. "They really caught on about a year ago. When we'd run an ad on them, we'd sell quite a bit -- in the thousands. The wooden ones just don't sell anymore; that's just about dead now."
The non-stick paddles are the brainchild of a man named Jiro Oyama, president of a Japanese manufacturing company called Akebono Sangyo, according to Okimoto.
Oyama, it seems, had gone to a sushi house where he noticed that the chefs were using a wooden paddle that because of its age had a developed grain or texture that wouldn't allow rice to stick.
He tried to duplicate the texture on a plastic paddle, but did not succeed until he saw an ice rink being sprayed with a light mist that caused tiny bubbles to appear on its surface. The bubbles allowed skates to glide more smoothly on the ice; when he did the same to plastic -- eureka -- rice didn't stick.
Exactly why the the rice doesn't stick obviously has something to do with the texture.
Fred Harris, a professor of physics at UHM, has not seen the new paddle himself. But braving a guess, he believes the rough surface may be the reason.
"A dimpled surface presents a smaller contact area," he said, and the smaller the contact area, the less likely things will stick to it.
Whether there're innies or outies doesn't really matter, he said, because both shrink the contact area.
"I'll have to get one, try it out," Harris said. "Doesn't stick, huh? Really?"
Charles Lee, owner of Renaissance Hawaii Enterprises, is stuck on nonstick stuff. Other nonstick stuff
Lee, who distributes a nonstick rice paddle to Daiei, Marukai and some Longs stores, is also marketing a nonstick Spam musubi maker.
Like the rice paddle, the musubi maker owes its unsticky nature to bumps, Lee said.
"They work pretty good," he said. "Less clean up."
The device he now imports from Korea makes only one musubi at a time, but a double-barreled version will be available in stores in a month or so, he said.
Cost for the single-shot maker runs about $4.99.
Also on the nonstick scene is the Universal knife, a plastic, serrated blade that doesn't adhere to melted cheese, like on lasagna and pizza, or mochi or gooey cakes.
Bob Skaggs of Longs said the knife was developed to slice lettuce and cabbages without bruising or causing the vegetables' edges to brown, but it's great for icky products, too.
The knife, which will be available in April, costs about $2 at Longs; similar ones run about $5 to $6 in kitchen speciality shops.
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