Last week I flew home to Louisville, Kentucky to spend some time with my family. My sister works at this upscale grocery store there called The Fresh Market. Once, while waiting for her shift to end, I was browsing the aisles and came across a selection of exotic rices. There were all sorts of rices I'd never seen before, but the most intriguing was bamboo rice.
Bamboo rice is a short-grain Chinese rice described as being fresh, vibrant, and floral. It gets its striking jade green coloring from bamboo juice and is supposed to echo the flavor of jasmine green tea.
The packaging instructed me to use the bamboo rice in any style of Asian cooking, so I started by eating it with chicken and vegetables stir fried with ginger and garlic. It wasn't the best choice--I quickly realized that any kind of delicate floral flavor the rice may have had was drowned out by the intense flavors of the ginger, garlic, and sesame oil that I used. Besides, the most fantastic thing about bamboo rice is its color, which was obstructed when I dumped stir fry on top of it.
I decided the best way to showcase the vibrant color and faint flavor the bamboo rice had was to make a delicately spiced rice pudding. I decided to use this recipe, switching out the regular rice for bamboo rice, the lemon zest for orange zest, and the raisins for chopped, dried papaya. It was really good and certainly beautiful. I might even go further to the Asian side next time, switching out cardamom for the cinnamon and coconut milk for the regular milk.
Even with this second recipe, I didn't end up tasting much of the alleged jasmine green tea flavor of bamboo rice. However, the unusual color is more than enough to convince me to use bamboo rice again.
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