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Blue rice has a wonderful wow factor visually, but it’s also a pretty typical part of Southeast Asian cuisine. In Malaysia, where my family is from, I associate it with sweet sticky rice desserts called kuih. But I have also seen savory coconut rice in other Southeast Asian dishes sporting this beautiful hue. The color is all natural, and comes from butterfly pea tea, which is just dried butterfly pea flowers. When steeped, they produce a rich royal blue colored liquid, that turns purple/magenta when combined with an acid like lemon juice. I don’t personally find that the tea has much flavor without adding sugar/honey, but it sure is pretty.

It’s really up to you how much tea you want to steep and for how long. Obviously, the darker the tea, the darker and more vibrant the color of your rice will be. The recipe below is just a suggestion; I like to get mine pretty seriously blue, but I also think that dishes like nasi kerabu look beautiful with a pale blue rice.

In San Francisco, I buy my butterfly pea tea from a great grocery co-op called Rainbow Grocery, but I have also seen it available online. If you are unable to find it, you can still make a very easy coconut rice by using regular ol’ water in this recipe.

Ingredients

1 cup rice*
1/2 cup coconut milk, shaken before measuring
pinch of salt
1 tbsp butterfly pea tea
1 cup+ hot water (a little more than a cup will account for the loss of water absorbed and strained out by the tea)

*Note about measuring rice: Some rice recipes base their measurements on the small plastic cup that comes with many rice cookers. To avoid confusion, this recipe uses the standard U.S. measuring cup, which is about 240 mL.

Procedure

Combine the hot water and tea and allow to steep for at least 15 minutes, or up to overnight. (The rice in the photo at the beginning of this post used tea that was steeped for about 30 minutes.) When ready, strain out your tea flowers and use the liquid only. (You may still be able to get another round of blue liquid with the flowers you strained out, but it won’t have much flavor.)

Thoroughly wash and drain your rice and put it in the pot of your rice cooker. Add your tea, coconut milk, and salt. Stir to combine. Cook your rice as you normally would in your rice cooker. My tiny rice cooker literally only has one setting that says COOK, so that is the setting I use.

When done, fluff your rice with a rice paddle, because who fluffs rice with a fork?

You can use this same rice preparation as a base for my cheater version of mango coconut “sticky” rice! Find the recipe by visiting my friends over at Nomtastic Foods!