Puto Bumbong is a Christmas-season rice cake of deep violet, steamed inside short bamboo tubes that give it its name and its slender, cylindrical shape. It is made from pirurutong, a purple heirloom glutinous rice, soaked overnight and packed into the bamboo to cook over steam. Slid out of the tube, each piece is brushed with butter or margarine and topped with grated coconut and dark muscovado sugar. It is sold steaming from stalls outside churches during Simbang Gabi, the pre-dawn Christmas mass.
Puto bumbong is named for its method — puto, steamed rice cake, and bumbong, bamboo tube — and is one of the most recognizable foods of the Filipino Christmas. It is bound to Simbang Gabi, the nine-day cycle of pre-dawn masses held from December 16 through Christmas Eve, a devotion that several accounts date to the early Spanish colonial period in the 1600s, when farmers attended before the day's work. The signature color comes from pirurutong, the deep-purple heirloom glutinous rice, soaked and traditionally fermented overnight for a faintly sour edge.
Soft and sticky, faintly chewy, with the gentle nutty taste of purple rice and a barely-there sour note from the overnight soak. The butter melts in and slicks each cylinder; the grated coconut adds moist richness, and the muscovado brings a deep, almost molasses-like sweetness rather than a clean sugar hit. Eaten warm, often with a cup of salabat or hot chocolate, in the cold dark after dawn mass — much of its pleasure is the season and the setting.
The bamboo tube is both mold and flavor: steam passes up through the open ends to cook the packed rice from all sides into a neat cylinder, while the wood lends a faint woody scent. Pirurutong rice carries the natural purple pigment, deepened by the small share of white glutinous rice it is usually cut with for texture. The overnight soak hydrates the hard heirloom grains so they cook tender, and traditionally lets wild fermentation develop the slight tang that distinguishes it from a plain sweet rice cake.
Variations
Where pirurutong is hard to find, cooks tint white glutinous rice with ube or purple food coloring to mimic the hue — a common modern shortcut that trades away the heirloom flavor. The toppings are near-fixed: butter, grated coconut, and muscovado, though some add a sprinkle of grated cheese. Specialized brass or metal steamers with fitted tubes have largely replaced raw bamboo in busy stalls, faster but lacking the woody note.
On the Palate
Where Puto Bumbong sits in the Filipino flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 6How it's made
8 steps · 20 min
- 1480 min
Soak the purple and white glutinous rice together in water overnight.
- 28 min
Drain well and grind or pound coarsely, then season with a little salt.
- 35 min
Pack the rice loosely into the bamboo tubes, leaving room for steam.
Watch outPack the rice loosely into the tube, leaving room for steam — pack it tight and the steam can't rise to cook the center.
- 43 min
Set the tubes upright over a pot of boiling water in the steamer.
- 515 min
Steam until the rice turns tender and deeply purple throughout.
Watch outSteam until it's tender and deeply purple all the way through — pale patches mean the grains are still raw inside.
- 63 min
Push each cylinder out of the tube onto a banana-leaf square.
- 73 min
Brush with melted butter and roll in grated coconut.
- 82 min
Sprinkle generously with muscovado sugar and serve hot.
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