You wouldn’t know it now, but as a child I was a very picky eater. So one of my favourite foods – and the first meal I ever learned to make – was a Chinese pour-over rice porridge.
Pàofàn, or por-veh as we call it in Shanghainese, is frightfully simple. Put the kettle on and take your leftover rice from the fridge. Pour the boiling water over the rice so it comes up about halfway. Press the hardened clumps of cold rice into the hot water with the back of a spoon, breaking them up into grains. Then eat it with all your favourite toppings and condiments, cradling the warm bowl in your palm.
It’s a rousing start to a brisk winter day – or a cosy homecoming after a long, noisy night out. And if you’re feeling poorly, rice porridge offers hydration, energy and easy digestibility. It’s a cure-all.
Personally, I like the infinitely customisable austerity of just rice and water, but you can also revive day-old rice with soup or green tea – in fact the Japanese name for pour-over porridge, ochazuke, combines the words for “tea” and “submerge”.
Melbourne restaurateur Tomoya Kawasaki – co-owner of the rhyming trio of Collingwood eateries Chotto Motto, Neko Neko and Wabi Sabi Salon – makes his ochazuke with dashi (a light Japanese stock made from bonito flakes). He says he always keeps cooked rice in the freezer so it’s ready to go. “I put it in the microwave and then every morning I can eat rice,” he says. “It’s like a toaster.”
His go-to topping for ochazuke is thin slices of wood ear mushroom that have been soaked for 10 to 15 minutes, Chotto Motto crispy chilli oil and some spring onion. “Very simple but that’s my leftover, hangover food,” Kawasaki says. It’s a gluten-free recipe that can easily be made vegan if you use a dashi made from kombu instead of bonito.
Chilli oil is also a staple for chef and cookbook author Rosheen Kaul, but she says her latest condiment obsession is Korean Buldak chilli sauce. “I put it on absolutely everything,” she says.
Her favourite rice porridges are Indonesian bubur with sambal, shredded chicken and fried soybeans and Taiwanese or Teochew congees with braised meats and egg.
“Every east Asian culture has something like this,” says Alan Chu, the second-generation owner of Mother Chu’s Taiwanese Gourmet in Sydney. His family has been serving Taiwanese breakfast foods at their Haymarket restaurant since 1991, and one of their signature dishes is a savoury congee with lǔròu – pork mince braised in a rich, aromatic soy sauce base.
Chu classifies rice porridges into a three-part taxonomy based on texture and method: there’s my lazy favourite, pàofàn, made from cooked rice submerged in hot liquid. There’s xīfàn – rice cooked in plenty of water so it’s a thin, soupy consistency. And then there’s the thick, almost creamy sort you find at yum cha, made by cooking rice and other ingredients in water or broth until the grains break down. It’s known as jook (Cantonese), juk (Korean), okayu (Japanese), zhōu (Mandarin), cháo (Vietnamese), bubur (Indonesian and Malaysian) and many other names through its vast geographic reach. In English, we often call it congee.
The word congee ultimately derives from the Tamil kanji or kañci, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first used in Anglo-Indian English in the 1600s to refer to “water in which rice has been boiled, frequently given as an easily digested food to sick or elderly people, or used to starch clothing or other fabric”. As the British East India Company moved into southern China, the term began to be applied to Chinese porridges.
It’s a quirk of this ever-ravenous language and British colonial history that we use a word with Tamil origins to denote a Chinese dish, while the Tamil dish kanji is less widely known. But for Sri Lankan Tamils and their diaspora, kanji has become a symbol of suffering, survival and resistance. Every year on 18 May, a modest kanji of rice, water and a pinch of salt is served in coconut shells to commemorate the Mullivaikkal massacre and the end of the civil war in which many were forced to make their meagre supplies stretch.
For many others, congee is associated with illness and grief. In times of hardship, it offers the soft landing you need. In fact, Joan Didion writes of its restorative power in The Year of Magical Thinking, her account of the year following her husband’s death:
I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
If you don’t have a friend to deliver you daily congee, here are some ways you can experiment with any kind of rice porridge at home.
The base
“The base has to be very simple,” Kawasaki warns. “I don’t put too much flavour in it. It’s like the base of pizza … if you have too many flavours in there, it’s kind of fighting with the topping.”
There are many recipes available for a basic rice porridge (plain, chicken, Kaul’s fish congee), whether you’re using a stovetop, rice cooker or pressure cooker.
The toppings
Because porridge provides a solid foundation that can support the most outlandish whims, there are no rules when it comes to toppings.
Don’t feel constrained by cuisine either – if you want to try peanut butter or sauerkraut on your congee, go for it. As a kid I went through a phase of having warm ricotta in my rice every night and discovered the creaminess pairs well with rich Shanghainese flavours.
Savoury: “Prosciutto or pancetta, with a really smoky kind of flavour, is really matching,” says Kawasaki. He makes a simple okayu topped with prosciutto, chilli oil and spring onion. A more traditional favourite is leftover mince with chopped okra and katsuobushi (bonito flakes). And lastly, he likes a dry oven-roasted salmon, minced over ochazuke.
For a ready-made option, fried dace with salted black beans has a nostalgic place in my heart. It’s easy to find the red and yellow Eagle Coin oval cans at many Asian grocers (and even some major supermarkets).
Pork floss – salty-sweet and woolly-soft – is perfect for porridge too, though the price gives me pause. A more economical topping is chicken mince, fried until crispy and then flavoured with light and dark soy sauce.
Crunchy: A classic marriage is congee and yóutiáo, a fried dough stick that’s airy and soft on the inside but golden-crisp on the outside. Mother Chu’s makes theirs in-house, hand-kneading so the dough stays pliable. While some patrons like their yóutiáo cut up in their congee, Chu prefers his whole so it stays nice and crisp as he dips it into his bowl.
If you can’t find fresh yóutiáo near you, crispy wonton skins or fried shallots are excellent crunchy substitutes. Alternatively, vegetables such as wood ear mushroom and bean sprouts offer a different kind of crunch – a moist snap rather than a dry crackle.
Things in jars: The curious and complex flavours of pickles, ferments and preserves play well with porridge. Kimchi, jiàngguā (pickled cucumbers) and zhà cài (pickled mustard greens) are the obvious choices, but any Asian grocer will have aisles of things in jars that you can spend a lifetime testing out. Preserves from other cuisines work too, as do homemade pickles.
My personal favourite, however, is zivu (or fǔrǔ in Mandarin), a fermented tofu with the texture of Danish feta and the taste of nothing else. Creamy, funky, salty and lingering, it’s often compared to blue cheese, but for me the flavour is much more balanced across the palate. I like the versions with a hint of chilli, and I serve it Shanghai-style with a sprinkle of white sugar and a dash of sesame oil.
Century egg is mostly used in pork and century egg congee, but it works as a side for plain porridge too, as do bamboo shoots in chilli oil and sweet fermented soybeans. And these long shelf-life pantry staples are a godsend for those of us who live alone.
Kawasaki recalls that if he was sick as a child, his parents would make him okayu with umeboshi, a sour, salty pickled plum. “That’s traditionally what we do when you are sick and you don’t want oily things,” he explains.
Carbs: Chu says many classic Taiwanese breakfasts serve up a double feature of carbs: congee with yóutiáo, of course, but also with steamed breads and buns, or the greasy goodness of a crisp, fragrant spring onion pancake.
Sweet: There’s also a whole world of sweet rice porridges, such as eight-treasure porridge with dried fruit and nuts.
When I really want to treat myself, I make a two-course porridge extravaganza: a light pour-over porridge with lashings of spicy, savoury toppings, followed by a dessert of black sticky rice porridge with coconut milk. It ticks every box on the flavour bingo card.
Afterwards, as I tuck myself into bed, I am tickled to picture my insides awash with porridge, as if I’ve pulled a doona of pudding over a bed of pàofàn. Rice on rice – there’s nothing better.
