Quinoa Chenopodium quinoa
Rinse it or the saponin coating tastes soapy. Toast it dry once it has drained.
In the kitchen
Under heat
It absorbs water and the germ spirals out from each grain when fully cooked — that visible ring is how you know it’s done.
Against air
The saponin coating protects the grain in storage; once rinsed and cooked, treat it like any cooked grain and refrigerate promptly.
In storage
Dry and unrinsed, it keeps like rice — airtight, cool, more or less indefinitely.
At the shop
White, red, and black quinoa all cook the same way; red and black hold a slightly firmer bite.
Which variety, for what
- White quinoa
- The mildest and fluffiest of the three once cooked.
- Red / black quinoa
- Firmer bite and a slightly nuttier flavor — holds its shape a little better in a salad.
Beyond the kitchen
NOT A GRAIN
Quinoa is a pseudocereal — the seed of a plant related to spinach, beetroot and chard, not a grass. Amaranth and buckwheat are in the same category: eaten like grains, botanically nothing of the sort.
RINSE OFF THE SAPONINS
The seed coat carries saponins, bitter compounds that deter birds. Most packaged quinoa is pre-washed, but rinsing under cold water for thirty seconds is cheap insurance — unrinsed quinoa tastes soapy and the bitterness does not cook out.
THE SPANISH BANNED IT
Quinoa was sacred to the Inca, who called it the mother grain, and the Spanish suppressed its cultivation after the conquest in favour of European crops, partly to break its ritual role. It survived in highland communities and was largely unknown outside the Andes until the twentieth century.
THE PRICE BOOM
Global demand from around 2006 raised prices sharply and transformed Bolivian and Peruvian farming. The claim that this priced local people out of their staple was widely reported and has been substantially complicated by later research showing rising incomes in growing regions.
A longer history
Chenopodium quinoa was domesticated in the Andean altiplano around Lake Titicaca between three and four thousand years ago and became a staple of Andean civilisations, valued because it tolerates altitude, drought, frost and saline soil where almost nothing else grows. The Inca treated it as sacred, and the emperor is recorded as sowing the first seed of the season with a gold implement.
Spanish colonial administration actively discouraged it, both to promote European grains and to suppress its ceremonial significance. For four centuries quinoa persisted as a subsistence crop in highland communities, essentially invisible to the wider world.
It re-entered international attention in the late twentieth century, and the United Nations declared 2013 the International Year of Quinoa. The resulting export boom raised prices dramatically and reshaped rural economies in Bolivia and Peru, while cultivation has since spread to North America, Europe, India and China — a crop that went from regional obscurity to global commodity in roughly three decades.