What is khao niew mamuang?
Khao niew means sticky rice, mamuang means mango. In Thailand, food stalls and market vendors sell the dessert in spring, during the mango harvest. You get a portion of rice, a few slices of mango and a spoonful of thick, salty coconut cream on top. Vendors often sprinkle roasted yellow mung beans over it, which crunch like sesame.
The right rice
For mango sticky rice you need glutinous rice, sold at Asian grocery stores as glutinous rice or sweet rice. The chalk-white grains are almost pure amylopectin and stick together after steaming. Pudding rice and sushi rice turn mushy and do not get the chewy bite. Despite the name, glutinous rice contains no gluten. The article Cooking sticky rice explains soaking, steaming and cooking without a steamer basket.
How to get mango sticky rice right
- Soaking: Give the rice at least 4 hours in cold water. Overnight, it cooks more evenly. Unsoaked grains stay hard inside, even if you steam them for a long time.
- Steam instead of boil: The rice sits in a steamer insert above the water. If you boil it in water, it clumps into a block.
- Only warm the coconut milk: If it boils, the fat separates and the sauce looks oily.
- Pour it on hot: Pour the coconut milk over the rice while it is still steaming. Cooled rice hardly absorbs any more liquid.
The salty coconut cream
In Thailand the rice gets two coconut mixtures. You soak the sweet one into the rice, and you pour the salty one over it when serving. For the cream, heat 80 ml coconut milk with 1 pinch of salt, 1 tsp sugar and 1 tsp rice or tapioca starch that you first stirred into 1 tbsp cold water. Stir until it thickens and let it cool. With the salty note, the mango tastes sweeter.
Which mango works?
Thai cooks use nam dok mai, a yellow, low-fiber variety with a flat pit. Outside Thailand you find it at an Asian grocery store or as air-freighted mango. Ataulfo from Mexico and Alphonso from India work as well. Green Kent and Keitt mangoes from the supermarket are often sour and fibrous. The fruit should give slightly under your finger and smell sweet at the stem end. Cut off the cheeks on either side of the pit, peel them and slice them crosswise into 1 cm wide slices. Fan the slices out next to the rice, the way the food stalls in Bangkok plate them.
Variations and storage
- Blue sticky rice: Boil 10 dried butterfly pea flowers in 100 ml water and soak part of the rice in it. The grains turn blue.
- Pandan: A knotted pandan leaf in the warm coconut milk gives a flavor of vanilla and hay.
- Without mango: In winter, serve coconut rice with banana or try black rice with coconut cream.
Eat the dessert on the day you make it. In the fridge, sticky rice turns hard, and after 5 minutes in the steamer it is soft again. Other desserts with sticky rice and coconut milk are Bua Loy and Khao Tom Mud. As a savory side, you know sticky rice from Khao Niew.
