What is sortexed rice?

Question

Here is a link to rice I want to buy. It is quoted as being polished and sortexed. I was wondering exactly that meant? Sortexed is not a word I heard before.

Answer 1

It's a word derived from the brand name for a machine used in processing the rice.

As the word already suggests, it is a machine for sorting the rice. With rice that has gone through this process, you can save the step of sorting it manually, and just cook it straight out of the package.

Rice has to go both through a size-sorting and "remove unwanted contaminants" step before being cooked. Size-sorting is easily done with sieves, but the contaminant step is very work-intensive. It is also very important, not only because of the yuck factor (it removes bugs and diseased kernels) but also because rice-as-harvested contains small stones, which can break your teeth when eaten.

Historically, people had to sort their rice at home. Nowadays, rice sold in Western countries is pre-sorted, and this information is not listed on the label. The label can make sense either in a country where both sorted and unsorted rice is sold (the link you showed is from South Africa, a country with huge inequality, so it is very likely that you would have customers for both kinds there) or in a country where people, for some reason, prefer machine-sorted rice over manually sorted rice (maybe because of higher trust in the machine's ability to spot all stones, or because of the higher visual uniformity of the result).