Besotted With Bubur

Rice porridge must be Asia's most underappreciated dish. We love the stuff. Chinese congee, Vietnamese chao, Thai khao tom, Philippine arroz caldo, Malaysian and Indonesian bubur ... cook rice to mush, add savory (or sweet) ingredients, and we're there.

Our ardor runs so deep we've pondered a cross-regional rice porridge pilgrimage to target towns, cities, and states known locally for their rice porridge specialties. Maybe a book - The Bubur Chronicles, or the Khao Tom Trail. Problem is, rice porridge's poor reputation outside Asia pretty much precludes publication. Heck, I can't even sell an article on the topic.

That doesn't mean we don't continue to feed our lust for this anytime-of-the-day meal-in-a-bowl. Having first come to know the joys of an expertly made rice porridge in Hong Kong, where we lived in the early nineties, our allegiance long lay with the Cantonese version: minimally flavored (chicken and sesame oil, dried oysters), thick and smooth. These days we're firmly in the Indonesian bubur camp. So much so, in fact, that we'd wager the world's best rice porridge can be found just about anywhere in that vast island nation.

Indonesians treat rice porridge the way Italians treat soft polenta, as a blank canvas on which to paint layers of flavor. We've had spicy bubur and mild bubur, soupy bubur and stodgy, you-can-stand-a-spoon-up-in-it bubur, bubur that's mostly meat and bubur that tastes like a vegetable patch. It's all good. Every Indonesian bubur leaves us hankering for the next.

So it was last week, high in the hills above Cianjur, Java. We were up at 5 with the sun and by 6:30am our bellies were rumbling. Western Indonesia is on the cusp of its rainy season and the dampness combined with the altitude made for a bit of chill, so we were cold too. Hungry and cold - the perfect state in which to dive into a bowl of bubur.

This vendor has been dishing up bubur from this cart, in this village, since 1982. We can't imagine what this part of Java looked like more than 25 years ago, but we're pretty sure his bubur closely resembles its quarter-of-a-century-younger self.

The beauty of Indonesian bubur - or the versions we've tried, anyway - is that it's literally a sum of parts, assembled a la minute. Which means that you can always have it your way. First the rice, thick and so creamy you could moisturize your face with it,

followed by: a drizzle of soy sauce, a sort of 'curried' mixture of chopped leafy greens, onions, and snake beans, shredded chicken meat, a spoonful or three of fiery and slightly sweet cooked sambal made with green chilies, deep-fried soy beans, crumbled rice and melinjo crackers, and a flurry of chopped cilantro.

 

There are several possible approaches here.You can leave the assemblage intact, dipping in here and then there for mouthfuls of discreet flavors, a method adhered to by several baby-toting villagers who alternated a spoonful of plain porridge from the side of the bowl for their charge with a more challenging combination of rice, crunchy toppings, and sambal for themselves. The boys who stopped at the cart to fuel up before class (it's strategically parked right below a middle school), on the other hand, were too busy chatting to pay much attention to their bubur - their spoons haphazardly fell and scooped where they may.

I grabbed my spoon and stirred everything together, which I suppose defeats the purpose of layering ingredients one-by-one but does trigger a pleasant Rice Krispiesean snap-crackle-pop as crisps are subsumed by porridge. When I mix my bubur I tend to rescue a bit of sambal and shove it to the side of the bowl so that I can pepper my generally one-alarm meal with the occasional three-alarm mouthful.

This village bubur was so good that, having ordered one bowl to share, we followed it with another, and then returned the next morning (breathlessly - we'd been out walking and feared that Bubu Man had finished for the day) for two more. Back in Jakarta, we followed that up with tinutuan, a deliciously vegetable-heavy bubur native to Manado, the capital of North Sulawesi.

And all this has me remembering an equally tasty bubur we ate on Bali last March. According to my notes it was doused with a chicken-and-turmeric broth containing noodles and batons of chayote. Seeing as we won't be back to Indonesia for a while, it may be time to get into the kitchen and experiment. 

Comments

[Lizzie]

Congee is my ultimate comfort food, whenever I was feeling unwell my grandma would make some with dried scallops. This one sounds great, I really should make it more often; such inexpensive ingredients, too.

[Mila]

Rice porridge remains my go to food when I'm not feeling well. But it was a revelation to have the zhou in Taiwan, where you'd order either plain or one cooked with chunks of pumpkin/squash, then order whatever savory dishes you want. My dad and I would choose oysters in black bean sauce, a salty dried fish, pork sauteed in garlic, vegetables like long beans, tofu, then add it to the zhou. I realized zhou was the perfect foil to whatever I felt like eating.
But I love a bowl of arroz caldo, with a squeeze of calamansi, a splosh of patis, topped with fried garlic, green onions, and slices of boiled egg.

[Kristine]

Although I am actually not at all a fan of bubur, your lovely expose - and brilliant photography (is it just me or is Indonesia THE best spot for people photography?) almost makes me want to try again...!

[TJ]

Dear Robyn, Dave,

You guys are "weird", by Western standard I think, to like this sort of gruel. But hey, those farangs do not know what they are missing!! Bubur on, I say! I love it too.

[lotsofcravings]

thats definitely a diff kind of gruel that im used to..not the smooth blended hk version..although i will b very tempted to try this esp with that sambal on the top!

[Wendy Hutton]

At last! Someone singing the much-deserved praises of bubor, the Southeast Asian version of chicken soup for the soul. Love it, love it, love it! Even though I've lived in Indonesia, and love tinituan, the bubor of Manado, I don't think I've had the excellent Javanese version you write about so glowingly. Worth going back to track it down some time soon.

[Tuty]

Robyn and Dave,
Thank you so very much for showcasing a much beloved bubur. Rice porridge is the ultimate comfort food in Indonesia and the variety is endless depending on the ethnic group serving it. Your beautiful photographs made me so homesick.... especially during the cold and rainy days in the Pacific Northwest.

Please visit my beautiful home country often.

[Robyn]

Lizzie + lotsofcravings - I do love a plainish Hong Kong-style porridge.

Mila - I think the porridge you describe is Teochew-style, with all the accompanying dishes. I haven't tried to make arroz caldo, really should.

Kristine - there is no way you could not like this porridge. And yes, Indonesia is fantastic for photography.

TJ - we probably are. I just think if farang knew more about different types of bubur/porridge they'd give it a try and find they actually like it. It's the words - 'rice porridge' or 'rice gruel' that are a real turnoff.

Wendy - I for one would return to Cianjur for this bowlful...

Hi Tuty - I'd love to hear more (about various buburs attributed to various ethnic groups). Bubur is becoming sort of a pet obsession of mine. Drop me an email (link up top at right).
And we will be spending much more time in Indonesia in 2009, so you can look forward to more posts.

[Life 2.0]

It's breakfast time and why am I not in Java eating Burbur, but instead trying to push myself out the door into a 1/2 foot of snow and 20 degree F weather in Michigan. WHY!!!!!!!!!! (sadly, I do know the reason and in 2 years, SEA will be my home.)

[Stephen @ theworldrecipebook]

Great article guy's, takes me back to surfing bali in the 80's