Hello Asean Hive Community
How are you today? I hope you are ok. Rain has been slowing down in the last few days, I do not know if this is a good sign or not. We have some massive flood in Sumatera,
I hope they are ok and of course less intensity of rain definitely help them to recover from the flood.
So today I will talk about Kue Putu, or in english it is PUTU cake. There is a similar cake from Filipina, it is called Puto Bumbong. They are very similar, only differ in taste because the finishing ingredients are different.
Kue Putu, or some people call it Putu Bambu (sounds similar to Puto Bumbong, right?) is a cake made from rice flour. They use pandan leaves to give the green color. They are made by order, so you order them and they will make it. It is not a cake they make prior the order come.
How to make it is simple, you need a bamboo as the mold of the cake. You fill the green rice flour inside, filled with some palm sugar, then steamed them in that bamboo tubes. After they are well cooked, you put them out and add some desiccated coconut.
Simple isn't it?
Usually in the evening the PUTU sellers are out wondering around in the neighborhood looking for customer. There are people selling it with a bike which I have taken the shot above, some using a cart and they push it manually, some even use some small baskets and steamer that they carry on their shoulder.
There is a similarity there, they use high pitched whistling sound that is generated from the hot steam coming out from the steamer.
This is their steamer, it is a simple oil can and they make a few small holes (you can see one of them is clogged by a match) and a big whistle that makes a putu whistle.. their signature whistling sounds.
This is the phase when the seller was filling the bamboo tubes with those greenish rice flour. He filled those green rice flour with some sugar palm, from that yellow bucket.
Later he will pull out the well cooked steam putu cake with his stick there. on His chart you can see the tubes are the raw ones and the cooked one is on the right side above the food paper.
It seemed this steamer only had two holes and he only steamed the bamboo tubes with two stack only. The process for the steaming was less than two minutes, maybe it needed only around a minute. So in a minute he could cook 4 Putu cakes.
I did not know why he needed so many bamboo shots in his cart. Maybe the steamer could cook 6 tubes at the same time, which was 3 stack of tubes for each hole but this seller had some skill issue in juggling those tubes lol.
This was my order. I bought five of them, each was 2000 rupiah or around 0.12 USD. I do not know whether this is expensive or not, but definitely it is not cheap for a traditional cake.
Here I cut a cake in half and you can see the melting palm sugar inside. When they were raw, all were solid powder. When they got steamed, the rice flour become a cake and the palm sugar got slimery.
Anyway this cake only tastes good when it is warm or hot. If you do not eat it soon, they get cold and the taste become... meh...
Ok that's for today post. Feel free to leave any comment and thanks for coming here.
Thank you for coming and reading my post. I live in Jakarta, Ex-Capital City of Indonesia. I used to live by making money online, that's why I like being here, on HIVE, and in #PIMP - (Paper In My Pocket) community.
