Unusual Uses for Bamboo

[Bamaboo]

It seems that most uses for bamboo are pretty well known. Building, of course--houses and fences and the like. Then there are things like cups and flower vases made from sections of culms. There's eating the shoots and certain types of leaves and wrapping some foods in other types of bamboo leaves. Then there are flutes and walking sticks...

Anything else?

I read about one unique use that I never heard of anywhere else. It was in Ted Meredith's "Bamboo for Gardens": you boil rice in a section of culm and use that section to carry the rice in. That sounds good and I think I'll try it this year.

But here are the two I personally saw in Japan.

1) Nagashi somen: a cook boils noodles in a pot. Lengths of broad-diameter bamboo are split and set up as troughs, one end in a stream of clean water. The other end is downhill. Guests sit beside the trough and the cut, uphill, puts the boiled noodles into the trough. The clean stream water washes the noodles down the bamboo trough and the guests pick the noodles out with chopsticks as they flow past. They dip the noodles into a soy sauce mixture and eat them. Somen is the noodle and "nagashi" means "flowing."

But THE most unique use I encountered for bamboo is this:

2) Bamboo sake. You have a fire and some green bamboo. You cut a section of the bamboo, open on one end, closed on the other. You pour the sake (rice wine) into the bamboo section and set the closed end down in the fire. The bamboo "roasts" in the fire and warms the sake inside. When the sake is heated, you take out the bamboo, which is smoking by now, and drink the sake straight from the bamboo. The combination of the roasted bamboo and the smoke enhance the flavor of the sake. You do this, preferably, in the mountains beside a bamboo grove in fine weather. What a day!

Anyone know of stranger uses than these for bamboo?

Best to all.

[Roy]

http://www.bambus.de/infos/1000/indexx.php

This site should help you, but I clicked on it several times and I kept getting this error:

404 Error- Seite nicht gefunden

[boonut]

I used to have that site listed on my links. The funniest one I remember was a real bamboo bra....

[Jeff: Igor's Apprentice]

I hear Madonna had to change her look because she couldn't find adequate material for the construction of larger and larger cone bras....

If only she had been hip to bamboo, she might still be poking eyes out instead of causing adoption scandals....