Chef's Secrets: How To Cook A Bamboo Rice Dish With Few Ingredients So It Tastes Delicious

Nothing puts me off more than a long list of ingredients in a recipe. And if the food is all cooked in one pot, better still.

But cooking with just a few ingredients demands skill. To deliver taste and texture, the quality of produce is as important as the timing, seasoning and garnish.

This recipe relies on choice bamboo shoots, so I usually cook it after Chinese New Year, when fresh bamboo abounds in the market. You can get vacuum-packed bamboo shoots all year round, but nothing beats the fragrance of a fresh shoot.

For this dish, you can also use water bamboo shoots, which are actually a kind of wild rice. They are also known as wild oats. You cook them in the husk and peel them to reveal sweet, crunchy flesh.

Many cultures have their version of bamboo rice. I like the Japanese version, which uses fresh shoots and is eaten only in spring.

Whichever shoot you use, you need to trim and boil it before adding it to the pot.

I serve bamboo rice with a clear consomme – usually chicken soup, skimmed of fat and scum, and flavoured with rice wine and white pepper – and some Japanese pickles on the side.

I use brown rice for its nutty flavour and cook it in dashi (available in packets or make your own by boiling a small piece of kombu seaweed with dried bonito flakes in two cups of water) with the shoots.

I add nori seaweed strips and chopped spring onion before serving. You can also add tau pok, fresh soya beans or mushrooms.

Despite its simple components, there is much to recommend in this dish. There is a lot of fibre from the brown rice and the shoots. It does not have cholesterol or saturated fat. And you can jazz it up with red chilli or chilli flakes.

Get Sylvia Tan's Bamboo Rice recipe here.

Sylvia Tan is a freelance writer and cookbook author. Her most recent recipes can be found in two cookbooks, Eat To Live and Taste.

Text: Sylvia Tan/The Straits Times / Photos: Nivash Joyvin/The Straits Times, 123rf.com

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