Vietnamese Pinawa or Brown Rice Hand Mill

Dr Abe V Rotor
Living with Nature - School on Blog
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 DZRB AM  8 to 9 evening class Monday to Friday

Dr Felipe Briana of NCBA demonstrates an indigenous dehulling hand mill. The mill works on a rotary motion as the operator pushes the handle back and forth in continuous motion.  Paddy rice or palay is fed on the top and slowly goes down the wood block.  The hull which consists of 25 percent is separated at the junction of the moving block and the stationary stone block.  The recovered whole grain is called pinawa or brown rice.  It contains the bran which is rich in minerals and vitamins, oil and digestible fiber. Rice bran is traditionally used as animal and poultry feeds.

It is therefore recommended that rice should be "unpolished." However, white or "polished" rice is preferred in the market.  There is need to re-educate rice consumers the value of brown rice to fight malnutrition especially in marginal communities.  

During WW II, rice am was used for infants and nursing mothers in the lack or absence of milk.  Am is actually the thick soup of rice while it is being boiled. Am from brown rice is more nutritious than that of white rice. This milk-substitute was developed by Dr Manuel Zamora and was named tiki-tiki.  It was later commercialized as United Tiki-Tiki by a transnational pharmaceutical company.  

Modern rice mills use twin-rubber dehullers to separate the hull, then the brown rice undergoes a series of polishing, and the process produces bran in two or three grades. The fine grade is prepared like the original tiki-tiki, while the inferior grade is used as feed components. By the way, rice brokens or binlid is fermented into beer. This reduces the cost of local beer, otherwise original beer which is made from barley (which we don't produce here) would be very expensive. 

Make tiki-tiki at home  

Why don't you make your own tiki-tiki at home? Add water more than the usual when cooking rice.  Harvest the thick soup and make it as porridge or lugao, without the rice. Add a little milk and sugar, or just sugar, and serve it as milk supplement or substitute for weaning food for infants, and convalescents. 

Another pinawa hand mill made of bamboo basket lined with clay. Former Farmers' Museum, National Food Authority, Cabanatuan City.  In the picture is Dr. Romualdo M del Rosario, former deputy director National Museum, and a staff member of NFA.