Rice wine from flaked rice?

My wife is Chinese and she wants me to make her a simple rice wine that she can use for cooking. I've tried making sake in the past with the rice malting and such that was a total fail. What if I mashed flaked rice and pitched S-05 yeast. Could that make a simple rice wine? Thanks!

Newton said:

My wife is Chinese and she wants me to make her a simple rice wine that she can use for cooking. I've tried making sake in the past with the rice malting and such that was a total fail. What if I mashed flaked rice and pitched S-05 yeast. Could that make a simple rice wine? Thanks!

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Flaked rice is better used for rice beer or an adjunct to barly malt beer.
Try this to make your wife some

You can use flaked rice, but you still need to do something to convert the starches to sugars. Whether that's a traditional koji culture as in sake, one of the Chinese starters used for rice wine, or a mash like in beer, something has to do the conversion.

What if you were to take some amount of flaked rice, soak it in 160 degree water, put this water/flaked rice mixture in a fermenter and pitch the yeast after it has cooled. After fermentation, you use the strainer method to separate the wine from the mush. Wouldn't this work?

Soaking flaked rice in water will do nothing. You need amylase enzymes. You can buy straight amylase or throw a small amount of crushed malted wheat or 6row in.

Newton said:

What if you were to take some amount of flaked rice, soak it in 160 degree water, put this water/flaked rice mixture in a fermenter and pitch the yeast after it has cooled. After fermentation, you use the strainer method to separate the wine from the mush. Wouldn't this work?

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No. Like flowerysong said, you have to have some type of enzyme activity to convert the starches to sugar. In beer, barley has enzymes that are active in the 140-160F range that break down starches. In Sake making, a mold called koji which also breaks down starch into sugar is introduced to the rice. If you steep rice or flaked rice in hot water and strain, all you will get is starchy water. There will be nothing for the yeast to ferment.

Say I made the mash 10% 2-row pale malt?

It would probably convert eventually, try an iodine test in 2 hours. Malted wheat has even more diastatic power than pale 2-row. You'll want to either use a large mesh bag or include at least a pound of rice hulls to lauter.

http://www.tibbs-vision.com/sake/instrct.html

everything you wanna know about sake,I bought 50 grams of koji from them.

The most interesting thing is making moto.
which is

187.5 short or medium grain rice,cooked and cooled.
75 grams of kome koji(which is malted rice)you have to make that first.
270ml water(chilled,soft,chlorine and iron free)
5 grams of lager yeast and ferment at 40-50 degrees for 10-14 days,the instructions say"as starch is converted to sugar then alcohol in one instantaneous process,usually high alcohol levels can be created from low alcohol yeast."

and its says around 19%

Thanks for all the tips, but I'm shooting for cooking grade rice wine and not sake. I did an experiment a few days ago where I did a cereal mash with 9 lbs of rice and then added 1 lb of malted wheat and 1 tsp of amalaze enzyme with 4 gallons of water. I let this "mash" sit for 2 hours and ended up with a good starch to sugar conversion...after cooling, I pitched some ale yeast and this stuff has been bubbling hard for 2 days.

very good to here,let me know how good the rice wine taste.

How is this coming along?

As of a couple of days ago it has gone from an initial OG of 1.054 to 1.020. I hope the gravity drops more as this is a pretty week "wine" thus far. It tastes like rice wine though...

There doesn't seem to be a lot of good yeast food in there... I don't know how much yeast like rice, but I don't think it's much. Yeast nutrient (or maybe even energizer?) might pick up the reaction a bit, or you might just need patience.