Singapore Expats

Have you tried boiling rice without using a rice cooker (or with an old one)?
Did you ever get some slightly burnt (but still edible) rice crust at the bottom of the pot?
What do you call that in your native language?

For your reference:

Burnt Rice!

kerak nasi

I'd just like to say that we have one word for this ("tutong")--the burnt, crusted rice sticking to the bottom of its cooking pot--and I'm curious if others do as well. From what I know of languages, if a culture has a word for something, it probably means it's a natural part of that culture. You know how Eskimos have many words for snow or how the Japanese actually have kanji for baseball.

Yum, looks like the best bit when eating claypot rice!

mmm...or at the bottom of a dolsot bibimbap...or the soccarat of a paella...

found this chinese wiki entry on 'burnt rice': http://www.hudong.com/wiki/%E9%94%85%E5%B7%B4

roughly translated from the entry - in Guangzhou they call 'guo jiao' (burnt rice of the pot), in Szechwan they call it 'guo ba' (not sure what is 'ba' but 'guo' means pot), in Shanxi, 'guo zha' (which means fried rice of the pot).

apparently it's also sold over there in pieces as a snack food in 'cracker form'.

and there's this old chinese story about burnt rice:

A guy named Chen Yi had a mom who was a bit of a burnt rice junkie. So being a fillial son, every time he cooked rice for lunch at work, he'd save the browned bit in a bag for his mom.

One day, a foreign army invaded the county while he was at work. The local army was sent out to meet the invading forces, and Chen Yi, also a bit of a hero, took his bag of burnt rice along and joined the fight.

But the local army was defeated by the invading forces and the survivors (Chen Yi being one of them) ran away into the mountains. A lot of people died of hunger, but because Chen Yi had his stash of burnt rice he managed to live it out and was rescued eventually.

There's also a moral to the story about being fillial...blah blah...