Development of a new rice beverage by improving the physical stability of rice slurry

“Rice slurry” made from brown rice with wet stone milling, which was developed as a new liquid food material. Raw brown rice is hard to be chewed and eaten unlike cooked rice. Therefore, “rice milk”, a beverage made from rice slurry, was developed to ingest raw brown rice. The rice particles in the rice slurry settled to the bottom when the slurry was allowed to remain for several hours. Two conditions, overly fine particles or an increase in the viscosity, suppress the sedimentation velocity of the particles. A separated milling method was established, which reduced the particle size to less than 20 μm. Moreover, the sedimentation velocity decreased exponentially with the viscosity and was steady at more 80 mPa s when the concentration of xanthan gum exceeded 0.1 wt%. A sensory evaluation indicated a favorable rate of 55.6% for the rice slurry containing 0.3 wt% xanthan gum.