Daetongbap (Rice Steamed in a Bamboo Culm)

Variations

• Pressure cooker instead of a steamer: stand the tubes upright and give them 15 minutes from the moment it comes up to pressure. The bamboo dries out faster, so the tube is definitely a one-use tube.
• Other grains: adzuki, foxtail millet or Job's tears in place of the sorghum. Soak anything hard separately and in advance.
• Unsalted: restaurants in Damyang salt nothing and send a soy dressing alongside. The salt above is for eating it without one.
• With tteokgalbi: in Damyang this is normally the rice course of a tteokgalbi set. Some places pour hot water into the emptied tube afterwards and drink it.
• Not dried bamboo: a dried culm scorches in the steamer and gives back neither aroma nor moisture. What this dish needs is green bamboo with water still in the wall.

Tips

• The tube is the vessel and an ingredient at once. Lo mai gai sorts wrappers into two kinds — "banana leaf is a container; a lotus leaf is an ingredient" — and a green culm is both. It holds the shape of the rice and it gives it its smell. It is easy to confuse with the bamboo leaf a zongzi is wrapped in: a leaf wraps, a culm contains.
• The steam never touches the rice. Steaming explains that the heart of the method is steam condensing on a cold surface and releasing its latent heat all at once. Here that cold surface is not the rice, it is the bamboo wall. Seen from inside the tube this is not steamed rice at all; it is rice cooked in a thick-walled pot, which is why the water is measured in beforehand.
• What the water cannot do is leave. The ratios in cooking rice are numbers that include the part that goes past the lid of a pot. In a sealed culm that part is zero, so the same rice takes less water. First attempts usually come out wet, and this is always why.
• Fill it four-fifths, no further. A pot would simply boil over; a tube has rigid walls. Packed full, the swelling rice lifts the paper cover, steam gets in through the gap, and only the top of the rice goes sodden.
• There is no way to look. Lifting a lid to check is not part of this dish. Forty-five minutes is the figure for a tube 7-8cm across filled four-fifths; add five to ten for a fatter one.
• Why the bamboo has to be three years old or more. A young culm has thin walls and splits while steaming; a very old one is hard and gives up little aroma. Damyang is the home of this dish because it is where bamboo grows thick and hard.
• A quarter of the grain is glutinous rice. Cooking rice records that ordinary short-grain rice is about 17% amylose while glutinous rice is effectively 0%, and that amylose is the part that recrystallises as it cools. This is rice that arrives in its tube and is eaten slowly, so that property earns its place — the same property songpyeon uses, for a different end.
• One tube, one meal. Steamed once, the bamboo dries and cracks and has almost no scent left. The second sitting would just be rice cooked in a wooden cup.