Why You Should Wash Your Quinoa Before Cooking
Quinoa is a quick-cooking, protein-rich grain that makes a great, healthy dinner on weekdays, but some batches can have an unpleasant bitter taste due to saponins, bitter compounds designed to repel birds. But we are not birds and we can avoid saponins through washing.
You can buy the quinoa pre-washed or rinse it quickly yourself. To determine if a pre-washed product actually outperforms its unwashed counterpart, America’s Test Kitchen ran the following flavor tests:
- Pre-washed quinoa, rinsed before cooking
- Unwashed quinoa, rinsed before cooking
- Pre-washed quinoa, non-rinsed and cooked as is
- Unwashed quinoa is not rinsed or cooked as is.
All four samples were prepared identically (see video above for process description), blind sampled and rated for bitterness. Unsurprisingly, the cleanest batch (pre-washed and rinsed) won out and had the least bitter taste. The unwashed, washed sample and the previously washed, not washed sample both ended up in the middle with no noticeable difference in taste, while the unwashed, unwashed sample came dead last and was by far the most bitter.
Result? Buy a pre-washed product and rinse quickly before cooking. This will ensure that you always get the tastiest quinoa ever.