Here’s a simple congee recipe for adaptable rice porridge
Pierced by winding rivers and dotted with ponds and lakes, the Jiangnan region in China’s lower Yangtze area is famously the home of Shanghai, the country’s biggest city. But Jiangnan is just as well-known for its verdant land and fruitful waters.
“The first time I heard Jiangnan referred to as yu mi zhi xiang — the ‘Land of Fish and Rice’ — was as my family and I sped along a small road by Taihu, ‘Lake Tai,’ with a beautiful golden field of rice swaying gently with the breeze on one side,” writes Betty Liu in her gorgeous cookbook “My Shanghai: Recipes and Stories From a City on the Water.”
Among the many recipes in the book, almost half feature rice in some form. There are pumpkin rice cakes with red bean paste, rice-encrusted pork ribs steamed in lotus leaves, sticky rice rolls filled with black sesame seeds, and many others. But one of the simplest rice recipes is for zhou or xi fan — often called by its Anglicized name, congee.
A simple rice porridge, in its most basic iteration, it’s a combination of rice and water in a ratio of about 1 part rice and anywhere from 6 to 12 parts water. The rice is boiled and simmered until the grains release all of their starch, thickening the water as they fall apart.
Known as juk or jook in Korea, bubur in Indonesia, lugaw in the Philippines, teochew in Singapore and dozens of other names around the world, there are also an endless variety of ways to make it.
“You can make it with plain water or any kind of stock ... you can vary its flavor with spices, dried roots, other grains, vegetables,” Liu tells me by phone from Boston, where she’s completing a surgical residency. Congee can be eaten plain, but it’s almost always topped with a few savory tidbits before serving.
Her congee recipe is meant to be a base that home cooks can play around with, adding or subtracting liquid to achieve their ideal texture, augmenting with other grains or vegetables for flavor, and finally topping with a variety of proteins and pickled, preserved or fresh vegetables.
In her book, Liu suggests topping congee with pickled vegetables, a thousand-year egg, salted duck egg or chile-fermented tofu. But the possibilities are unlimited.
“When I was a kid, we would each have our bowl of congee, and then a little dish of fermented bean curd. We’d take a spoonful of congee and then use our chopsticks to pick off some of the fermented bean curd,” Liu says. Today, she loves it with a drizzle of soy sauce and pickled mustard greens or kimchi.
“But you can use whatever you like or have on hand. Leftover duck or leftover Thanksgiving turkey are always good in cooler months,” Liu says, also noting that you could rehydrate dried mushrooms, use that liquid to cook the congee, and saute the mushrooms to serve on top.
For a springtime congee, she suggests sauteed or pickled green garlic or ramps — blitzed into a pesto or blistered in a hot pan — fresh peas, herbs and lemon juice.
In the summer, corn is ideal on congee, either simply steamed kernels or a puree of fresh corn, swirled into each bowl. Quartered cherry tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs? Fried eggplant and zucchini? Tiny, just-cooked shrimp? Yes, yes and yes.
“Growing up, congee was never served the same way,” Liu says. “One message I want to get across is that I think some people think Chinese food is intimidating. But there are no real rules with congee. It’s your kitchen, it’s your rules!”