Mango sticky rice: steamed glutinous rice and coconut sauce
One of Thailand's most famous desserts rests on an ingredient with no substitute: glutinous rice. It is a variety with a quite different starch composition from ordinary rice — almost entirely amylopectin, which makes the grains cling once cooked. Traditionally it is not boiled but soaked for four hours and steamed — that way the grains are sticky without turning mushy. The rest is coconut milk with sugar and ripe mango.
Your own work in that: 55 min.
- Soaking 240 min
- Steaming 30 min
- Coconut sauce 25 min
Step by step
0 / 6 doneSoak the rice four hours
Rinse the rice twice, cover with cold water by 5 cm and soak at least 4 hours, ideally overnight. The grains swell and turn chalky white. Without soaking, steamed glutinous rice stays hard in the middle.
Ingredients: 300 g glutinous rice · 1000 ml water
TipIt must be <b>glutinous (sweet) rice</b>, not jasmine or arborio. No other variety has this starch structure and none will cling in the same way.
Four hours, grains chalky whiteSteam it, never boil it
Spread the drained rice in a steamer basket lined with muslin, in an even layer. Steam over boiling water 25 minutes, turning the mass halfway. It is done when translucent and sticky to the fingers.
TipBoiled in plenty of water, glutinous rice easily turns into a sticky mush. Steam hydrates it gradually and lets the grains hold their shape — which is why in Thailand it is traditionally cooked in a bamboo basket set over a pot.
Twenty-five minutes over steam, not in waterMake the coconut sauce
Warm 300 ml of the coconut milk with the sugar and ½ teaspoon of the salt, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Do not boil it — boiled coconut milk splits into fat and water. The salt is not an extra: without it the sauce is just cloyingly sweet.
Ingredients: 400 ml coconut milk · 100 g brown sugar · ¾ tsp salt · 1 tsp potato starch
Warm, never boiled; salt obligatoryPour the sauce into hot rice
Tip the hot rice into a bowl, pour over all the warm sauce and fold it through. Cover and leave 25 minutes. The rice absorbs the sauce entirely and turns glossy and creamy — at first it looks far too wet, and that is right.
TipThe sauce must meet <b>hot</b> rice. Cooled glutinous rice firms up and stops absorbing liquid — the sauce then sits at the bottom of the bowl.
It looks too wet, which is normalThicken the pouring sauce
Warm the remaining 100 ml of coconut milk with the rest of the salt (¼ teaspoon) and the starch slaked in a tablespoon of cold water, and cook 60 seconds, until it thickens to single cream. This is the sauce poured over at serving — thicker and saltier than the one folded into the rice.
Slice the mango and serve
Peel the mango and cut the two cheeks alongside the stone, then slice them and fan them out. Spoon the rice onto plates, lay the mango beside it, pour over the thick sauce and scatter with sesame. Serve at room temperature, not chilled.
Ingredients: 2 pcs mangoes · 2 tbsp sesame seeds
Two cheeks along the stone, sliced and fanned
Before you start
Choosing a mango
It must be very ripe: yielding under a finger, fragrant at the stem end and slightly wrinkled. A firm mango is sour and fibrous, and there is nothing in this dessert to mask that.
Without a steamer basket
A metal sieve lined with muslin set over a pot of boiling water and covered with a lid will do. All that matters is that the rice does not touch the water and that steam does not escape at the sides.
Don't refrigerate it
In the fridge glutinous rice hardens as the starch retrogrades. Make the dessert for the same day; leftovers can be steamed for 5 minutes to soften them again.
Other fruit
In Thailand sticky rice with coconut sauce is served not only with mango but also, for example, with durian. In Europe mango works best, and out of season peaches or ripe nectarines.
