A simple congee recipe for the beloved, adaptable rice porridge

Among the many recipes in the book, almost half feature rice in some form. There are pumpkin rice cakes with red bean paste, rice-encrusted pork ribs steamed in lotus leaves, sticky rice rolls filled with black sesame seeds, and many others. But one of the simplest rice recipes is for zhÕu or xi fàn — often called by its Anglicized name, congee.

A simple rice porridge, in its most basic iteration, it’s a combination of rice and water in a ratio of about 1 part rice and anywhere from 6 to 12 parts water. The rice is boiled and simmered until the grains release all of their starch, thickening the water as they fall apart.

Known as juk or jook in Korea, bubur in Indonesia, lugaw in the Philippines, teochew in Singapore and dozens of other names around the world, there are also an endless variety of ways to make it. “You can make it with plain water or any kind of stock … you can vary its flavor with spices, dried roots, other grains, vegetables,” Liu tells me by phone from Boston, where she’s completing a surgical residency. Congee can be eaten plain, but it’s almost always topped with a few savory tidbits before serving.

Her congee recipe is meant to be a base that home cooks can play around with, adding or subtracting liquid to achieve their ideal texture, augmenting with other grains or vegetables for flavor, and finally topping with a variety of proteins and pickled, preserved or fresh vegetables.

In her book, Liu suggests topping your congee with pickled vegetables, a thousand-year egg, salted duck egg or chile-fermented tofu. But the possibilities are unlimited. “When I was a kid, we would each have our bowl of congee, and then a little dish of fermented bean curd. We’d take a spoonful of congee and then use our chopsticks to pick off some of the fermented bean curd,” Liu says. Today, she loves it with a drizzle of soy sauce and pickled mustard greens or kimchi.

“But you can use whatever you like or have on hand. Leftover duck or leftover Thanksgiving turkey are always good in cooler months,” Liu says, also noting that you could rehydrate dried mushrooms, use that liquid to cook the congee, and saute the mushrooms to serve on top.

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