Just before dawn, baker Sasipen Pan rises and slips into her kitchen in central Thailand. On a sparkling clean counter, she begins making bread—or sometimes brownies or meringue cookies—with a “secret ingredient.” With support from the Rice Science Center at Bangkok’s Kasetsart University and The Rockefeller Foundation, Pan is the world’s only baker regularly using powder made from rice leaves, generally burned as a waste product. The only baker so far, that is.
If the Rice Science Center’s director, Professor Apichart Vanavichit, gets his way, food products from the leaves of a new breed known as Rainbow Rice will be widely used throughout the world for their nutritional value, taste, texture and beauty.