This is a very fond childhood memory for me: after dinner, my grandmother used to carve up the slightly burnt rice at the bottom of the rice cooker and have me and my siblings squeeze the crispy rice into balls to eat.
We call this noong in Taishanese and whenever I go home to Virginia to see my parents, I always request for noong at the end of a meal. There’s just something about the crispy crunchiness that brings back those childhood days when I bite into noong. What makes noong even better is some lapcheng aka Chinese sausage. Mmm!
I have tried to make noong in my own rice cooker, but to no avail: my parents say that they usually do the “cook” cycle on the rice cooker twice in order to produce some noong at the bottom. However, this is not a guarantee that there will be noong.
I hope one day to introduce noong to my own kids!