Red yeast rice (simplified Chinese: 红曲米; traditional Chinese: 紅麴米); pinyin: hóng qū mǐ; literally "red yeast rice"), red rice koji (べにこうじ, lit. 'red koji') or akakoji (あかこぎ, also meaning 'red koji'), red fermented rice, red kojic rice, red koji rice, anka, or ang-kak (Hokkien Chinese borrowed from Tagalog), is a bright reddish purple fermented rice, which acquires its colour from being cultivated with the mold Monascus purpureus.
Red yeast rice is what is referred to, in Japanese, as a koji, meaning 'grain or bean overgrown with a mold culture', a food preparation tradition going back to ca. 300 BC. In both the scientific and popular literature in English that draws principally on Japanese, it is most often known as "red rice koji". English works favoring Chinese sources may prefer the translation "red yeast rice".
Due to the low cost of chemical dyes, some producers of red yeast rice have tried to modify their products with red dye #2 Sudan Red G.
Famous quotes containing the words red, yeast and/or rice:
“The red of her lower lip
kissed off by her lover at night
can be seen at dawn,
reflected in the eyes
of other wives.”
—Hla Stavhana (c. 50 A.D.)
“Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 5:6.
“The arbitrary division of one’s life into weeks and days and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day. As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every corner of the world.”
—Alice Caldwell Rice (1870–1942)