Sticky rice in bamboo

Rice and coconut milk sealed in green bamboo and roasted over a fire until the tube chars through.

Vegan.

Ingredients

• 600 g glutinous rice
• 600 ml coconut milk
• 100 g caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 150 g black beans, soaked and boiled
• 10 green bamboo tubes, one node closed
• banana leaf, for stoppers

Method

1. GREEN BAMBOO, NOT DRIED. The tube has to contain water in its own walls -- that is what steams the rice from the outside while the fire chars the surface, and what stops the whole thing igniting. A dried tube burns through and spills.
2. Each tube needs one closed node as its base. Rinse the inside and let it drain.
3. FILL ONLY TWO THIRDS. The rice swells, and a full tube splits along its length.
4. Soak the rice 4 hours, drain, and mix with the black beans.
5. Warm the coconut milk with the sugar and salt until dissolved, and cool it.
6. Rice and beans into the tubes, then coconut milk poured in to about 2 cm above the rice. Shake each tube to settle it.
7. Stopper with a tight roll of banana leaf. It has to let a little steam out without letting rice out.
8. Stand them LEANING over the fire, stoppers up, around the edge of the embers rather than in the flames. Turn them a quarter every 15 minutes.
9. 1 hour to 1 hour 30. The outside blackens and the tube hisses; when the hissing stops and the surface is charred all round, they are done.
10. Cool, then split the tube away with a knife along its grain and peel the papery inner skin back from the rice. That skin coming away cleanly is the sign it cooked properly.

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 Thailand · All recipes