Suman (Glutinous Rice and Coconut Milk Boiled in Banana Leaf)

Variations

• Suman sa ibos: wrapped in young buri palm leaf instead of banana, long and thin, wound on in a spiral because the leaf is narrow. A common sight in the Philippines.
• Suman sa lihiya: a little lye water (lihiya) mixed into the rice, which turns it amber and chewier. Use food-grade lye water only.
• Half-cooked first: the rice is stirred in a pan with the coconut milk until the liquid has gone, then wrapped and steamed. That is the opposite order to this one — the coconut milk becomes the cooking liquid. The steaming drops to around 30 minutes, but the pan base needs watching.
• Cassava suman: grated cassava in place of the rice, mixed with coconut milk and sugar and wrapped the same way.
• What goes with it: latik syrup, dark brown sugar, ripe mango. In the Visayas it is often breakfast with thick hot chocolate (sikwate).

Tips

• Coconut milk before the heat, and it costs nothing. Mango sticky rice says "The rice is cooked in water and meets the coconut milk afterwards, and that is the whole design." The reason is in cooking rice: cook rice in something that is not water and that is "where three quantities change at once, not one." The ratio shifts; "Fat coats each grain and slows the water reaching its starch"; and it cannot be boiled hard. Nasi lemak pays all three. Suman mixes coconut milk into raw rice first and pays none of them, because the rice is not cooked in the coconut milk.
• The water is already inside the grain. Glutinous rice soaked overnight holds nearly all the water it needs to cook — which is why mango sticky rice puts its soaked rice in a steamer with nothing poured over it. What the coconut milk meets here is grain that is already wet inside, so there is no water for the fat to slow down, and no ratio to get wrong: the coconut milk is measured as a coating, not as a cooking liquid. Step 2, where the rice does not drink it, is the evidence.
• Nasi lemak's third cost goes too. There, "A hard boil splits it and the solids catch on the base of the pot", so the pot sits on the lowest heat. Suman spends an hour in boiling water, but inside a leaf there is no pot base to catch on. Any oil that separates stays wrapped up with the rice.
• A parcel with water in it. Lo mai gai explains that "because there is no water inside a sealed parcel, the rice has to go in already cooked." Suman's parcel has water in it — the water the soak put into the grain and the water in the coconut milk — so the rice goes in raw. And as with daetongbap, "since nothing evaporates the tube takes less water than a pot would": nothing escapes a sealed leaf either, so do not add water when you mix.
• Tight, and in pairs. Wrapped loosely, the pot water gets in between the layers of leaf and the ends go soft. Two logs tied face to face press each other's folded sides shut.
• Why rice that steams in twenty minutes takes an hour here. Steam in a steamer surrounds loose grains; here the heat has to cross the leaf and reach the middle of a packed log of rice 3cm across.
• It keeps to the next day. Glutinous rice has almost no amylose, and as cooking rice puts it, "glutinous rice both stretches and stays soft into the next day". Left in its leaf at room temperature for a day it is still soft. Any longer, refrigerate it and steam it to reheat.