Perfect Mango Sticky Rice At Home

This is a dessert that somehow I feel like many people see as exotic or hard to obtain. I think you can do it. As a matter of fact, I think anyone can do it. This is mango sticky rice. I love this dessert. Anyone who's had it knows the tales, knows the legends of its greatness, and anyone who hasn't had it, this is your time to shine. You need so few ingredients to make it, and it's not super, super, super expensive, but it is unbelievably rewarding if you like rice pudding, if you like mangoes, but also if you just like having a great dessert that blows your mind, blows your body away. Because when you eat this, you will want to probably go to sleep. This is a dessert for you. So, with that being said, let's make this, shall we? First, we're going to make our incredible sticky rice. Then we'll make two coconut sauces, an aromatic soaking liquid, and a thick one for drizzling. Slice up our ripe mango plate and enjoy. Sticky rice. So, it starts with one and a half cups of gluttonous rice. They're going to be really small grain. You have to use this rice. You can't sub jasmine rice. Don't throw in some random short grain sushi rice. Gluttonous rice, very important. Sweet gluttonous rice. That's going to go into a bowl. You're going to cover that with filtered water, and you're going to let this sit covered overnight in the refrigerator. You can do plastic wrap, you can do a lid. I really don't care, but the point is it must rest to absorb some of this liquid. But don't worry, it doesn't necessarily have to be overnight. It's ideal if it's overnight, but you can go as little as four hours, maybe two to three hours, but at least soak your rice. It's crucial to the texture. The longer you soak it, the better it gets. I'd say three to four hours minimum, because in general it's going to get that nice sticky quality. Okay, so next day, your water's a little cloudier, the rice is a little bit more plump and sort of like less matte, and kind of forming a little bit of translucency. They're also tender. This is important for the steaming process. So now, we're going to take that rice, drain the water out. We're now going to steam our rice. So, cheesecloth with just a bit of overhang, we've got a steamer basket set over a shallow pot of simmering water. You're going to lay in your cheesecloth, pour in your rice, and then evenly distribute that throughout the steamer basket. Oh, but why can't I boil it, or just do it traditionally and then drink? Look, listen. You want to introduce as little water as humanly possible. You want to maintain as much sticky, chewy, beautiful rice quality as we possibly can in this glutinous rice. Also, generally speaking, glutinous rice does a lot better just steamed like this. I bet you didn't know you could steam rice, you can't. Once it's in there, lid goes on. You're going to let this steam for about 20 to 30 minutes or just until the rice is cooked. And I don't want to say tender, but chewy. It should have no hard, dry rice in the center of it. Taste it every 20, see how it looks. It's important that you monitor the water in the pot. If this runs out of water through evaporation in the middle of your cooking process, you've got a problem because the rice is going to stop steaming and also you'll burn things and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, just make sure you have enough water in here so that it's not touching the steamer basket, but it is steaming the rice. If you run out, add a little more water in the bottom of the pot. Okay, so while that's going, we're going to make our sauce. But listen, a lot of mango sticky rice recipes for some reason use like 5 eighths of a can or like 3 fifths of a can of coconut milk. This recipe uses one whole can. So when you follow this, you'll use the whole can. You're not going to have a quarter cup of coconut milk just sitting in your fridge not knowing what to do with it. That said, this is half of our can of full fat coconut milk. This has such minimal ingredients that if you try to change any of these out, like, oh, well, maybe I'll get low fat coconut milk. Just expect this to go completely wrong. We've got a quarter cup of white sugar, half teaspoon of kosher salt, and although this is not traditional, you don't have to do this. I like to do it. Just a slight little flavor is three cracked cardamom pods that have been lightly toasted. Just a little bit of fragrance to that. Not traditional. Okay, omit it if you don't want it. I'm going to stir that, heat that up over medium heat, and just stir and let that heat just until the sugar's dissolved and it's steamy and hot. Then you're going to let it steam for about three minutes. Once that's done, take it off the heat, set it to the side, and now we wait for our rice to finish. Now, the other coconut portion is the coconut sauce. Very important. So, the other half of our coconut milk is going to go into a small pan, or saucepan rather, and then another quarter cup of sugar in that. So, we're going to heat this until dissolved and steamy hot. Oh, my God, magic. It's already steamy hot. What? We cut out the part where I was waiting for it. Now, the sauce is nice as it is. It's going to taste good. It has the flavor we want, but we want more viscosity. So, to make it thicker, small bowl, we're going to add a half teaspoon of cornstarch to that bowl. You can literally just pour a couple tablespoons in there of your coconut sugar mixture. Whisk that together. You're going to make a little slurry with your cornstarch. Make sure you whisk all the little dry bits out of there. No clumps, and then you just stir that back in, and then you're just going to keep heating that and stirring that just until it's thickened. You'll notice it pretty quickly. You don't want to over-thicken this. If for some reason you're like, oh, my God, it's so thick, it's not pourable, add just a tiny little splash of water, like a little half teaspoon of water at a time until it's the consistency you desire. I'm thinking like honey, maple syrup, viscosity, texture. Is that making sense? Is that making sense to you? Also, be mindful that when this cools, it's going to thicken even more, so don't go buck wild here. Now, this is not necessary, but if you want, you can put it in a little serving container. I got a little... You can also just put it in a cup and cover it, but the point is, put it somewhere and set it to the side. Let's finish that stinky rice. Okay, it's been 20 minutes, so I'm going to check it. First, ow. You're going to take the lid off. It looks done, but is it? You're going to take a couple grains off the top and just try them. Yeah, it's done. You can tell it's done specifically by the texture. It should be chewy, almost like mochi-like, and there should be no dry, crunchy bits in the center of that rice. If there is any crunchy bits, let it keep cooking until it's nice and tender. So heat off. I'm going to transition over here. Also lid off. This is the beauty of using cheesecloth, is you can easily kind of pull your rice out, pop it into a large bowl, bada-bing, bada-boom. We have not our thickened coconut syrup, but instead our steeped one with the cardamom pods. And at this point, you're going to take the cardamom pods out. They've steeped and delivered all their flavor. You can kind of squeeze them out a little so they get that extra, uh. And the cool thing is, you'll actually notice that this mixture smells fragrant of cardamom, but it's not going to be overwhelming. It's just a light little vibe in there. I'm going to lightly break this rice up just a little bit, and then you're going to pour all that cardamom coconut milk over your rice. You don't want to waste any. You might want to get in there and get it out of there. And then you're just going to lightly mix and fold that together. Upon first glance, you might be looking at this going, oh my God, I just ruined my sticky rice. Now it's risotto. It's loose and terrible. Well, you'd be wrong, because this is the stage we're going to cover this and let this sit for about 30 minutes, up to three hours if you don't have time, right? If this is going to be like a dinnertime thing and you started this early enough, you could always wrap this, set it up, finish making dinner, and then boom, ready to go. But it's important you do this because it must soak up and absorb all that flavor. We're at the final countdown. Mango. This is an important component. We want to make this look beautiful, so I'm going to coach you through this. We have a beautiful ripe mango right here. Make sure your mango is ripe. You don't want it too soft. You don't want it too firm. But you want to make sure it's just ripe enough so it's not stringent or crunchy or not sweet. You want it sweet, fragrant, beautiful, delicious. You can slice the cheeks off and then scoop out the flesh. I'm actually going to peel it and then slice it just so I get nicer looking mango. So take a nice sharp peeler, run it along your whole mango. You don't want any skin whatsoever. You really want to be careful when you're peeling this because you can see that it creates a bit of a ridged pattern. If you don't peel it evenly, you'll end up with a really ugly mango. Mangoes oftentimes are not quite a perfectly round sphere. They're sort of... What shape is this? Football ellip... ellip... ellip... elliptical ellipses? This is shaped this way. Got it? That means the f***ing seed is flat and going this direction, so I'm going to cut along that seed. We're essentially going to take a cheek off this. So you want to cut as close to the seed as possible. So if your knife stops here, that means you're essentially in the seed. So we're going to move over just a hair. I'm going to cut along that seed. Boom. Cheek comes right off. You can see the seed right there. That's perfect. I'm going to do the same on the other side, gently and carefully. Two cheeks. Two mangoes will get you four cheeks. That should be enough for your recipe. For the remainder of this, you can just nibble and chew on this. Now that we have our cheeks, simply just slice them. You can slice it as thick or as thin as you want. Some people like to make a little pattern. I like to slice them real thin so I can fan them out. And just like magic, look at that rice. It's not soupy anymore. It's soaked up all that beautiful coconut sugar cardamom mixture. Now you can serve this however you want, but I like to pack my rice into a small bowl, invert that onto my plate. Might take a couple taps to get that to come out. Take your thinly sliced mango and fan it out beautifully alongside your rice. And drizzle your thickened coconut milk over the rice. As much or as little as you like. You can always add more later, so maybe go light first. Top with toasted sesame seeds on the rice. Serve and enjoy. It is that simple. We finally get to taste. This is one of those things where the second you experience it, you realize, why haven't we been doing this more? Every day, all the time. This is a perfect food. It's creamy. It's rich. There's chewiness. There's that fresh sort of fragrant, fruity mango flavor that cuts through it. And somehow, all these flavors of the fragrance of the rice, the coconut, the mango, they come together as one flavor. It just is like a God-level flavor. You don't necessarily taste the coconut by itself or the mango by itself. It's all one harmonious symphony in the form of a dessert. And you know what? Despite the fact that it's extremely high carbohydrate, it's actually pretty good for you from a nutrient standpoint, I feel like, right? Maybe? It's a dessert. Who cares? Subscribe. Bye. I love you. Link's in the description for the rest of you, by the way.