How to Replace Rice in Your Dishes to Honor Traditional Mesoamerican Cuisine
Rice — a staple of Latin American kitchens for generations — is nowhere on the menu at Milpa Grille, the popular fast-casual restaurant in the heart of East Los Angeles' Boyle Heights. Instead, the spotlight is on corn, squash and beans, the famed triumvirate of the Mesoamerican milpa, a system of symbiotic planting that was developed at least 5,000 years ago in southern Mexico and Central America.
"Rice was never a part of the Mesoamerican diet. It was brought over by Hernán Cortés," Milpa Grille owner Deysi Serrano told me recently. "We try to honor the Mesoamerican tradition by not serving rice."
Milpa Grille's menu showcases pre-Columbian ingredients in crisp salads made with nopal (cactus), avocado and black beans; soups built around tomatoes, squash and chiles; and atol de elote, the sweet corn beverage that has been a staple of indigenous life across Mexico and Central America for at least a millennium. Serrano is not alone in rethinking the use of rice, which was introduced to Latin America and the Caribbean by European colonizers in the 1500s. Books such as Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel's 2015 cookbook, "Decolonize Your Diet," have inspired a new generation of Latinx cooks to meditate on the relationship between European colonization and food, and sparked greater interest in ancestral ingredients and cooking techniques.
Still, other home cooks are interested in consuming less rice to adhere to low-carb diets or for health reasons — according to one study, diets heavy in white rice have been linked to a higher risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes.
If you're interested in exploring rice alternatives in your home-cooking, for whatever reason, Serrano offers these culinary tips:
- Learn to cook with grains native to the Americas, such quinoa and amaranth, which are nutritious and rich in protein and fiber. Quinoa is one of the simplest substitutions for rice, said Serrano. For amaranth, she recommends using it to concoct a simple dessert. "It's very filling and has a great nutty taste. I've made it as a porridge using vanilla extract and almonds," she said.
- Incorporate more veggies. Serrano tries to keep prepped zucchini, summer squashes, peppers and other fresh veggies ready to go in the refrigerator for easy-to-make stir-fry bowls and other dishes that often use rice. "Calabacitas are so good and they have a lot of nutritional value," she said.
- For dishes that call for a starch, use potatoes. The root vegetable is indigenous to the Americas.
- Use cookbooks that emphasize plant-based eating and pre-Columbian culinary traditions. Serrano recommends Jocelyn Ramirez's "La Vida Verde" and "Oaxaca: Home Cooking From The Heart of Mexico" by Bricia Lopez and Javier Cabral.
- Use fresh corn whenever possible. Milpa Grille uses only freshly grilled corn, which lends many dishes an unmistakably crisp, sweet, fibrous quality that is impossible to replicate using canned corn. "Cutting the kernels off the cob takes a lot more work than making rice," joked Serrano. "But the flavor is always worth it."
