Kue putu or putu bambu is a traditional cylindrical-shaped and green-colored steamed cake, originating from Indonesia. The cake is made of rice flour called suji and coloured green with extract acquired from pandan leaf, filled with palm sugar, and steamed in bamboo tubes, hence its name, and served with grated coconut. This traditional bite-size snack is commonly found in maritime Southeast Asia, particularly in Java, Indonesia, where the cake is called putu bumbung. Kue putu can also be found in the Netherlands due to its colonial ties with the Dutch East India with Indonesia. In Indonesia, kue putu is one of the kue or traditional snacks, a popular street food commonly sold by travelling vendors, together with klepon, which is actually ball-shaped kue putu, but made with sticky glutinous rice flour instead.
Ingredients and cooking method
It consists of rice flour with green pandan leafcolouring, filled with ground palm sugar. This green coconut-rice flour ingredients with palm sugar filling is filled into bamboo tube container. Subsequently, the filled bamboo tubes are steamed upon a steam cooker with small holes opening to blow the hot steam. The cooked tubular cakes then pushed out from the bamboo tube container, and served with grated coconut.
Etymology and variations
In Javanese, bumbung means "bamboo" or "a hollowcylindrical object; a tube". As the dish began to spread across the country, the name was later translated to Indonesianputu bambu. This reason behind the naming is because traditionally, the dish is made by filling in the tube of a bamboo with the ingredient. The variation of kue putu is often in its shapes or in its fillings. Kue putu of different shapes with almost identical ingredient, filling and recipes exist in Southeast Asia. The white-colored flatter dics-like shaped putu is called putu piring and more common in Malaysia, Kerala and Sri Lanka while the more thicker and rounder white or green-coloured putu mangkok is more common in Indonesia. In Singapore, however, putu mangkok is called kueh tutu. Traditionally kue putu is filled with palm sugar. Today, however, there are several new variations using different fillings, such as chocolate or abon.
Similar dishes
In the Philippines, puto is a generic name for any steamed rice cake. A type of puto very similar to kue putu is puto bumbóng which is also cooked in bamboo tubes. However puto bumbóng does not use pandan and is traditionally cooked as whole grains, rather than rice flour. It also uses a special purple variety of glutinous rice called pirurutong which gives it a deep purple colour. In India and Sri Lanka, a similar dish is known as puttu or pittu, though it is a savoury dish rather than a dessert.
