Madumongso — Central Java, Indonesia

Madumongso is a soft, chewy confection built on fermentation: black glutinous rice is first turned into tapai, a mildly alcoholic, sweet-sour ferment, before being cooked down into a dense paste closer to a fudge or dodol than to plain rice. Its dark colour and faintly tangy sweetness come directly from this fermented base. It is reported from Java, where fermenting glutinous rice into tapai is a common household skill and where the resulting ferment is often cooked further into sweets rather than eaten on its own. Madumongso is typically made for festive occasions and gatherings, when the time needed for fermenting and slow-cooking is easier to justify. Black glutinous rice is steamed, cooled, dusted with a fermentation starter and left to sour for about a day until it turns into tapai. This ferment is then simmered for a long time with coconut milk, palm sugar and a little salt, stirred constantly as it thickens into a sticky, dark paste. Once cooked and cooled enough to handle, small portions are wrapped in twists of colored paper, much like a sweet. Within the wider family of Javanese rice ferments turned into sweets, this version is set apart by its use of black rather than white glutinous rice, which gives it a deeper colour and a more pronounced tang, and by the long, slow reduction with coconut milk that concentrates the sweetness rather than leaving the ferment loose and syrupy.