Mango with black, purple and white sticky rice

Sticky rice is as Lao as it gets. It’s part of the ritual of life here and no day is complete without it. Before bed, or early in the morning it is washed and soaked. An hour or two is necessary, overnight is better, and then the rice is steamed in a bamboo basket over boiling water and the house fills with the fragrance. When it’s ready, it’s piled into a bamboo rice basket and served with the rest of the meal.
For special occasions, and particularly for desserts, black sticky rice can also be prepared. Uncooked, this whole grain looks similar to wild rice, and is nuttier and chewier than it’s white counterpart. It’s healthier too. One cup can provide up to 10% of the recommended daily fibre for an adult. It can be prepared on its own, in much the same way as the white sticky rice, but with a slightly longer cooking time (taste a grain or two after thirty minutes to see if it’s ready, but it’ll probably take around forty minutes until it’s done), or with the regular sticky rice - generally two cups of white rice to one cup of black rice will give you a sticky nutty rice. Don’t be fooled by the name. Once cooked, you can see that it is actually deep burgundy, making it an attractive accompaniment to the rest of the meal.
One of the most wonderful desserts found here is Mango with Sticky rice. When mangos are in season, their rich sweetness works perfectly with sticky rice cooked with coconut milk.
 

To make this dish, soak some sticky rice for an hour if you are in a hurry, but overnight if you can wait. Around 500 grams should be plenty for a family. Once soaked, steam it, preferably in a bamboo steamer, but if you don’t have one, in a metal steamer (lined with cheesecloth if the holes are big enough for the rice to fall through). It takes around for around twenty – twenty five minutes. When it’s ready, take it off the heat and prod the rice with chopsticks to release any trapped steam. Set this to one side.
Heat 250ml coconut milk in a pan. When it’s boiling, add 100 grams of sugar and stir until it’s dissolved. Next add half a teaspoon of salt and stir some more. Take out a spoonful of this liquid and put to one side for later. Add the sticky rice to the pan and keep stirring gently until it takes on a glossy gooiness. Cut a ripe mango into strips and arrange these around (or on) the sticky rice. Pour over the coconut milk that you put to one side earlier and sprinkle with black sesame seeds. The heat of the rice forms a lovely contrast with the cool mango, but it’s just as good eaten with cold rice. Don’t leave it too long before eating though. The rice definitely tastes best soon after cooking. Anyway, who can resist it?
If you don’t have black sesame seeds, toasted almond slices are wonderful too.
Try it with other fruit. Durian works particularly well with the coconut sticky rice but isn’t for the faint hearted (or sensitive nosed)! Bananas, plums and peaches can be good too.
For a delicious comfort food, add a little more coconut milk to the rice and create a porridge. This is particularly good if you stir in chunks of mango just before serving and it’s wonderfully warming during the cold season.
Sticky rice is true to its name. Now proven to have been used by the Chinese for building many ancient walls, including the city wall of Xi’an, it is also believed to have been used on the Great Wall of China, over 2,000 years ago. It is believed that the strength it provided is one of the reasons the Great Wall is still standing today.
If two colours of rice aren’t enough, how about three? For purple sticky rice, steam the white and the black rice as normal. Once ready, take equal measures of the two grains and mix them together in the coconut milk. As they cook, and mingle, the rice will turn purple.