Kralan is a traditional Cambodian rice dish cooked inside a bamboo stick with added beans and vegetables. Influenced by Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese cuisines, it is a popular dish during the new year. The recipe is not widely available online, but photos show the food being roasted inside diagonally angled pieces of bamboo. Kralan is an alternative to the Middle Eastern technique of serving meat and vegetables over rice, with both ingredients cooked together in the same container.
Kralan is a traditional Cambodian rice dish, where rice and other ingredients are cooked inside a bamboo stick. Ingredients such as beans and vegetables are added to the sticky rice. Locals tend to eat this food around the new year as an annual tradition.
Experts suggest that nearby culinary cultures influenced the kralan dish. Thai, Vietnamese and even Chinese elements can be seen in this food. The use of rice shows its importance as a basis for the local population.
In many preparations, the ingredients for the kralan are packaged in a bamboo stick. The space for the dish may not take up much of the length of the bamboo shaft, where most of this longer stick simply blows the air away from the fire. Photos taken by real chefs preparing kralan show diagonally angled pieces of bamboo, with the heat rising to roast the food. When the cooking is complete, those who eat the dish generally break off the bamboo pieces and take out the food.
Interestingly, not many formal recipes for this food are distributed on the Internet. In general, kralan is much darker than many other rice dishes from other regions of the world. For example, Spanish paella, which features simmered rice, and Arabic rice dishes are widely available online. Recipes for similar dishes from the Orient are also often available.
The way the kralan dish uses rice is similar to other preparations that originated in neighboring countries. For example, the Chinese have a habit of using guoba, or “burnt rice” in chunks. Where kralan also cooks rice harder than it is cooked in many presentations, it may not be “burnt” but simply air-dried and hardened into some sort of block. In a way, this presentation is also an alternative to the popular Middle Eastern technique of cooking a kabob of meat and vegetables and placing it over rice. With the Cambodian version and its special cooking method, both items, the vegetables and the rice, are served together and prepared in the same container.
Those who want to know more about this Cambodian food can find pictures describing its preparation. Cambodian cooks will also get more insider knowledge on particular cooking techniques. This food, which originated as a local way to celebrate a holiday, can be used in modern cosmopolitan reviews of world cuisine or explorations of foreign food cultures.
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