Bamboo-Smoked Rice Cake
Chunga Pitha
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The rice never touches a pot — it's packed raw into a hollow green bamboo tube and cooked entirely by an open fire's heat, with the bamboo itself acting as both oven and mold.
Sticky rice is packed into a length of young bamboo and slow-smoked over an open flame until the rice inside turns fragrant and lightly charred at the edges, then split open and eaten straight from the tube. It's made by Sylhet's indigenous hill communities and sold as a seasonal specialty in the region's hills and plains alike.
Why it's made this way: The technique comes from the hill tribes of Sylhet and neighboring Assam, where cooking rice inside bamboo was a practical, potless method that spread from the hills to the Sylheti plains and has since become one of the region's more distinctive specialties.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
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