Skip to content
LoginRegister
WhatToEat.Today

Recipes with green bamboo tubes

4 recipes that use green bamboo tubes, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Minil songa, takes 70 minutes. It is most often cooked with banana leaves, banana leaf and banana leaf pieces or foil.

Got a few things in the fridge? Search by everything you have

Minil songaBamboo-roasted sticky rice

The Garo of western Meghalaya make minil songa for festivals, hunting trips and family picnics, packing soaked sticky rice into lengths of green bamboo and roasting them in the embers until the rice comes out fragrant, firm and faintly smoky. At home, a hot oven or a grill gives a very good result. The mistake to avoid is sealing the bamboo too tightly: steam must escape. Chef's tip: if you have no bamboo, roll the rice in a double layer of banana leaf and foil.

70 minIndianRice & GrainsVeganGluten free
by KrazyBadal 0 views

Bamboo chickenBamboo-roasted spiced chicken

Trekkers heading up to Nilgiri and Boga Lake in the Chittagong Hill Tracts look forward to one meal in particular: chicken that Marma and Bawm cooks pack into a freshly cut length of green bamboo, plug with leaves and lean against the embers until the tube blackens and hisses. Inside, the meat steams in its own juices with ginger, garlic, lemongrass, turmeric and bird's-eye chilli, and picks up a faint grassy sweetness from the bamboo. It is eaten with plain rice and a sharp chilli chutney, often at a jungle campfire. At home a heavy lidded casserole or a tight foil-and-banana-leaf parcel in the oven gives a very close result. The trap is packing in too much liquid, which boils the chicken instead of steaming it; the meat makes its own juice. Chef's tip: use small bone-in pieces, because large joints stay undercooked in the middle of a tube.

90 minBangladeshiChickenGluten freeSpicy
by KrazyBadal 0 views

Bamboo tube riceSticky rice cooked in bamboo

Drive the mountain roads around Alishan, or through the Amis villages of Hualien, and you'll smell this before you see it: lengths of green bamboo lined up over charcoal at roadside stalls, their skins blackening as the rice inside steams. Indigenous Taiwanese cooks have long carried rice into the hills this way. When the tube is split, the rice comes out as a firm, sticky cylinder wrapped in a papery inner membrane, perfumed with grassy bamboo and earthy shiitake. Soak the glutinous rice for at least 4 hours or overnight before you start. Packing the tubes to the top is a common error: rice expands, so fill them only three-quarters full and plug them loosely. Chef's tip: use only fresh, green bamboo with one node closed at the bottom, and never seal both ends tight, or steam pressure can split the tube.

90 minTaiwaneseRice & GrainsVeganGluten free
by KrazyBadal 0 views

Luang Prabang khao lamSticky rice with black beans

Lines of blackened bamboo tubes propped beside smouldering charcoal mark the khao lam sellers on the roads into Luang Prabang, busiest in the cool season after the November harvest, when new-crop sticky rice is at its sweetest. Inside each tube, rice and black beans have cooked slowly in salted coconut milk, picking up a faint smoky, grassy flavour from the bamboo lining. You split the tube, peel back the thin inner skin and eat the dense, chewy, gently sweet log by hand, often on the morning walk or on a bus journey. At home the tubes roast in the oven or over a barbecue, and a lidded dish lined with banana leaf works if you can't get bamboo. Overfilling the tubes is the usual slip: the rice swells, the plug pops and the coconut milk boils away. Chef's tip: soak the rice overnight; well-soaked grains cook evenly right to the centre of the tube.

90 minLaoDessertsVeganGluten free
by KrazyBadal 0 views

Goes well with green bamboo tubes