Today, over 95% of wild rice on store shelves is cultivated, but some rice on the market is still wild if you visit the northern Midwest or special-order it.

Cultivated, or "paddy" rice, was domesticated by the University of Minnesota in the 1950s and has been highly cultivated in California since the 1970s.

Paddy rice is a hybridized crop bred to ripen simultaneously for efficient machine harvests by draining artificially flooded dikes, but it's not the same as truly wild rice.

The easiest way to tell the difference is that Minnesota and Wisconsin require paddy-grown rice to be labeled as such, and any California-grown rice is always paddy rice.

Wild rice goes through a hand-parching process where it is dried over a fire in metal drums and continually moved with a spatula. It lays out in the shade to dry.

Between this process and the nuances of the waterways it's grown in, finished wild rice is a light brown color and has a nutty, almost smokey taste.

Paddy rice is steamed and fermented for up to six days before being dried in a heated drum, simulating hand parching. It creates a tougher grain, good for shipping to stores.

The grains of paddy rice are a deep, glossy black from the fermentation process. They're chewier than wild rice and have a much milder flavor.