Roadside Icon · Bamboo-Roasted Sticky Rice

Kralan (Battambang Style)

Photo: Bahnfrend / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Connoisseurs insist you need Battambang's rice to make real kralan — the province is known as Cambodia's rice bowl for its unusually fertile fields, and locals credit that alone for giving Battambang's version the edge over every other region's.

Glutinous rice is mixed with coconut milk, grated coconut, sugar, and a pinch of salt, packed into a length of green bamboo, and roasted slowly over an open flame until the rice inside turns tender and faintly smoky. Vendors — often women balancing baskets on bicycles — split the charred bamboo open to order and sell it by the tube for about a dollar.

Why it's made this way: Battambang is known as Cambodia's rice bowl thanks to its fertile rice fields, and food-obsessed locals argue that's exactly why the province's kralan is considered the country's benchmark version, sold everywhere from roadside stalls to Angkor-area bus stops.

Read it in context →

More from Cambodia

🧊 Kafe Tik Dos Kolok

Num Banh Chok (Khmer Noodles) 🍚 Bai Sach Chrouk

Kuy Teav

Tuk Ampov (Sugarcane Juice) 🍝 Lort Cha

Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries. Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below. Photo credits.