Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Currently I'm in Vietnam, and recently I found a variety of bags of flavoured "instant rice porridge" in stores. Usually there's 3 components inside, the main component being dried rice flakes - ready for hot water to be added (the other two components are separate bags of spices & oils).

The consistency of the rice flakes and the ease of making a nice porridge with hot water makes me think it would be a great alternative to oatmeal. An added bonus is that it could be easier on the stomach for those that react to oats.

A quick google mentions something similar called Flattened rice, commonly known as poha [in india]. From what I can tell by looking at pictures of bags of Poha in google image search, it might be a bit thicker/heavier than the rice flakes I'm seeing here. I'm not entirely sure if the stores here would even sell a big bag of rice flakes, but I will check the next time I'm at the grocery store.

I'm curious if anyone here has ever experimented with rice flakes, and perhaps used it as hot cereal? Bags of poha might be available at your nearest indian/ethnic grocery store.

I've heard of poha and want to try it, but haven't found it locally in USA yet.

Rice flakes are probably marginally cheaper, greener, and faster-cooking than oats. The downside is that rice is almost entirely carbohydrate so you might need to add a protein or fat source to have a satiating breakfast. YMMV but I find that oatmeal and a hardboiled egg is enough to feel full until lunchtime, but a carb-only breakfast doesn't work. Rice flakes, coconut milk, and seasonings might work.

(It's true that some traditional diets derived almost all protein from rice, but that involves eating something like 4000 kcal rice/day. That worked fine when the people eating that diet were laborers burning that many calories per day, but is problematic for typical modern activity levels and calorie budgets.)

So I checked around but it doesn't seem like rice flakes are a thing that is sold at the markets in Vietnam.

Further online research shows some products like:

https://cdn0.woolworths.media/content/w ... 090893.jpg
https://www.buywholefoodsonline.co.uk/m ... 00_5_1.jpg

So it's definitely out there, maybe in whole foods type stores.

@KevinW, My experience with rice is that I can eat as much of it as I want without much repercussions. It might be mostly carb, but it's not the same as sugar or wheat for me. I'm a bit of a carbohydrate addict, so a bagel will cause cravings in me for 2 bagels the next day, doubling each day until I'm devouring whole pizzas and ice creams and so on. As I get older I seem to react more and more to wheat and oats. I even react to quinoa slightly (it's got sapporins, an evolutionary convergent analogue of gluten). Rice is my only safe harbour

I used to breakfast on pohay https://cookpad.com/uk/recipes/2221299- ... nion-pohay in Russia until stocks ran out. Above recipie uses coconut flakes instead of KevinW's coconut milk. Pretty sure poha and rice flakes are the same thing except that the former is in the singular.

Another type is puffed rice. One type of puffed rice can be munched on like crunchy snacks while others are better with warm milk.

Out of curiosity why not regular rice?

potential drawback: poha sounds like it would have higher glycemic index and lower insoluble fiber content than oats. That isn't a consideration for people who don't process oats well but for the rest of us, oats are the healthier option