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Why All Quinoa Should Be Washed Before Cooking

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It’s important to rinse your quinoa, in order to remove the bitter-tasting compounds called saponins on the surface of the seed. We tested prewashed and unwashed brands and found that both benefit from rinsing at home.

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With a high protein content, 10 essential amino acids, a firm, satisfying texture, and a nutty flavor, there’s a lot to recommend quick-cooking quinoa. The only real downside? It can be unpleasantly bitter, thanks to a concentration of bitter-tasting compounds called saponins on the surface of the seeds. In addition to being unpalatable, saponins are mildly toxic, causing low-level gastro-intestinal distress in some people. Some brands of quinoa come prewashed, while others don’t. To find out if prewashing guarantees less bitter quinoa, and if you should still rinse the prewashed stuff, we set up the following experiment.

EXPERIMENT
We purchased all available brands of both prewashed and unwashed white quinoa and rinsed half of each under cool water in a strainer for 1 minute while leaving the other half unrinsed. We cooked each sample using 1 3/4 cups water to 1 1/2 cups quinoa and tasted them blind, side by side. Tasters were asked to rank the samples according to bitterness.

RESULTS
We found no consensus on comparative bitterness between prewashed quinoa that we did not rinse and unwashed quinoa that we rinsed, suggesting that it doesn’t matter who does the rinsing, as long it gets done. Both of these samples fell in the middle of the pack for bitterness. However, we did have strong agreement on the other samples. The prewashed quinoa that we rinsed was deemed the least bitter while the unwashed quinoa that we did not rinse was by far the most bitter.

TAKEAWAY
Our results show that making the best-tasting quinoa begins at the supermarket, where you want to buy brands that are labeled as prewashed (in previous tests we found no texture or flavor disadvantage to prewashed quinoa— only the bitterness had been removed). But your work isn’t done yet—even prewashed quinoa benefits from a quick rinse with cold tap water in a fine-mesh strainer to produce the least bitter pilaf.

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Cooking

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