Kue putu

Kue putu

Kue putu in Indonesia
Alternative names	Putu bambu, putu buluh, puto bumbong
Type	Sweet dumpling
Course	Dessert
Place of origin	Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippines
Region or state	Maritime Southeast Asia
Creator	Derived from Indian puttu
Serving temperature	Room temperature
Main ingredients	Rice flour, palm sugar, grated coconut
Variations	puttu, puto

Kue putu or putu bambu, putu buluh or puto bumbong is a traditional cylindrical-shaped and green-colored steamed cake. The cake is made of rice flour with green color acquired from pandan leaf called suji, filled with palm sugar, and steamed in bamboo tube, hence its name, and served with grated coconut. This traditional bite-size snack is commonly found in Maritime Southeast Asia, which includes Indonesian, Malaysian and Philippines cuisines, and believed to be derived from Indian puttu of Tamil origin. Kue putu is also can be found in the Netherlands owed to their colonial ties with Indonesia.

Kue putu is one of Indonesian kue or traditional snack, and a popular street food commonly sold by travelling vendor, together with klepon, which is actually ball-shaped kue putu, but made with sticky glutinous rice flour instead.

It consists of rice flour with green pandan leaf coloring, filled with ground palm sugar. This green coconut-rice flour ingredients with palm sugar filling is filled into bamboo tube container. Subsequently, the filled bamboo tubes are steamed upon a steam cooker with small holes opening to blow the hot steam. The cooked tubular cakes then pushed out from the bamboo tube container, and served with grated coconut.

The variations of kue putu is often in its shapes or in its fillings. Kue putu of different shapes with almost identical ingredient, filling and recipes exist in Southeast Asia. The white-colored flatter dics-like shaped putu is called putu piring (Malay for: disc/plate putu) and more common in Malaysia, while the more thicker and rounder white or green-colored putu mangkok (Indonesian for: bowl putu) is more common in Indonesia. In Singapore however, putu mangkok is called kueh tutu.