#rice puff

[shirozen]

Coating each grain with patience

[buffetlicious]

This old-fashioned spicy but sweet biscuit 🍪 is popular in my childhood when we don’t have much selections in the market. I don’t know if youngsters still eat them nowadays. The spicy taste in the Spiral 5-Spice Biscuits (五香饼) came from the chilli powder, five-spice powder etc… used in the recipe. For the Rice Crackers 🍘, you can refer to it here.

[buffetlicious]

Crispy and crunchy Rice Puffs dotted with black sesame seeds and a cup of less sweet Milk Tea with a sachet of ginger powder added to it.

[buffetlicious]

Walked pass Polar Puffs & Cakes at Causeway Point after work and noticed that they are offering discount to their Strawberry Roll 🍰 (S$1.20/UP S$1.50 each). Bought three rolls; one each for my family. Nice fluffy soft texture with sweet strawberry 🍓 jam in the centre though sis commented it was a little sweet for her.

Helped myself to some of these super crispy Rice Puff Crisps 🍘 that sis bought from Chong Pang. It contains black sesame seeds which give a nutty flavour to it. So good that I can’t stop snacking on it. 🥰

[buffetlicious]

Mum chanced upon this Rice Crackers 🍘 (S$2.80++) at the local minimart while grocery shopping. The rice puffs 🍘 were so crispy and flavoured with stripes of caramel sauce that is not overly sweet. Ended up asking mum to buy a couple more packs to share with colleagues at the office.

[paulpingminho]

[reiyakhu]

Rice Puff Making at Tea and Rice Resort - Yilan, Taiwan

During my 5-day tour in Taiwan, I was able to visit three leisure farms in Yilan County and one of them is Tea and Rice Resort.

Photo courtesy of http://young100.ilc.edu.tw/

Located at No. 48, Section 2, Yongxing Road in Dongshan Township, Tea and Rice Resort was once a warehouse that has been partly converted into a museum that serves as a learning center for kids and even for adults! 

Tea and Rice Resort offers fun interactive activities such as mushroom planting, bento making and rice puff making to promote agricultural awareness and to achieve a better understanding about the importance of agriculture in the community.

They also offer a farm-to-table organic dining experience at their restaurant to showcase their farm fresh produce.   

They have a wide range of tea, rice and other agricultural products available at their shopping center. 

We were given a brief tour of their museum and had an introductory course on rice processing before we proceeded to making our very own rice puffs.

The first step of processing rice is to feed the grains of unhusked rice into a rice huller to remove the chaff. Here, Jaison Yang of Travel Warehouse volunteered to load the rough rice into the rice huller. Once turned on, the two abrasive rollers turn at different speeds to remove the chaff before it passes through the machine as brown rice.

The brown rice is later fed into a rice miller to remove the bran layer turning it into white rice. The whole process surprisingly took little time. 

Jude Bacalso, Cebu Daily News editor, placed a kilo of white rice into the rice puffing machine which was then sealed tightly so pressure can build up inside. As the machine was heating up to puff up the rice, we were all asked to stand back and cover our ears. Just right before the machine released all the pressure, the guides shouted “BE PO NGA!” which is a warning that something will explode. Sure enough, we heard a loud bang that sounded like a gunshot. 

The rice puffs were gathered and transferred into a ginormous mixing bowl... 

and brown sugar syrup was added to make it sweet and sticky.

Photo Courtesy of Jude Bacalso

We then popped them into heart-shaped pans and let them sit for a couple of minutes to cool and...

Ta-dah! This crunchy snack reminded me so much of a Cebuano treat called ampao that I wanted to take it home with me to show family and friends. But alas, I wasn’t able to because I devoured it immediately. It was irresistibly good. 

Thanks Taiwan Leisure Farms Development Association and Ma’am Jane Syjuco of Everbright Travel Agency for this fun and educational experience! Read about my Taiwan Travel Guide here What to Eat and Drink in Taiwan Rice harvesting at Fairy Story Village Organic Farm Mosquito repellent making at Forest 18 Farm Dragon fruit picking at Xing Ke Dragon Fruit Farm 

[oishifun]

Money Chocolate! I think every country has their own version of these. It does make a neat gift when bringing back suveniers. When I first visited an overseas country from the USA, I thought the money every where else was fun and colorful. Back then, the US only had green bills but they are slowly changing with a little more color in them. So here is some rice puff chocolate (think crunch bar) bar with a card that has 100 yen on it. I'm not sure if or when Japan had bills for the 100 yen. At the moment, 100 yen is a coin. But the bill resembles the other bills that they do have.