Puto bumbong

Purple glutinous rice steamed loose in bamboo tubes, never packed, with butter and coconut.

Vegetarian, but not vegan — contains dairy (butter).

Ingredients

• 500 g purple glutinous rice
• 100 g white glutinous rice
• 80 g butter, melted
• 200 g grated coconut
• 120 g dark muscovado sugar
• 0.5 teaspoon salt
• bamboo tubes, 15 cm long

Method

1. SPOONED IN LOOSE AND NEVER PACKED. The tubes are filled by dropping the grated rice in and levelling the top with a finger, no pressure at all. Pressed down, the steam cannot get through and you get a solid purple plug, raw in the middle and impossible to get out.
2. Soak both rices together in cold water overnight, then drain them for an hour.
3. GRIND THEM COARSE, not to flour. A food processor pulsed ten or twelve times, until it is the texture of damp semolina with some whole grains left. Ground to flour, it steams into a dense cake; left whole, it never cooks through.
4. Salt stirred through the ground rice.
5. Set up the steamer and get it to a hard rolling boil before the tubes go on. These cook in minutes and they cook by steam pressure.
6. Fill each tube loosely to within 2 cm of the top and stand them in the steamer holes.
7. 8 to 10 minutes. They are done when steam comes freely out of the top of the tube and the surface of the rice looks glossy rather than matt.
8. Push each one out with a thin stick or a chopstick onto a banana leaf, in one steady push.
9. Butter brushed on at once, then muscovado and a heap of grated coconut. Eat immediately -- they go hard within fifteen minutes and there is no reviving them.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Philippines · All recipes