Quick-cooking rice is manufactured by cooking white, brown, or parboiled rice, thus disrupting its cell walls and gelating its starch, then fissuring the grain in order to speed the infiltration of hot water when the consumer cooks it, and finally drying it. The fissuring may be accomplished with dry heat, rolling, microwave treatments, or freeze-drying.
From the book On Food and Cooking (2nd edition) by Harold McGee. © 2004 Harold McGee.
By permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.