Roadside Icon · Bamboo-Roasted Sticky Rice

Kralan (Battambang Style)

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

The rice is often studded with black beans or peanuts, and the bamboo's thin inner membrane peels away with the rice, leaving it wrapped in a papery skin.

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.

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Part of World of Street Food — 3443 dishes from 118 countries. Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below. Photo credits.