Mango Sticky Rice with Coconut Milk, Shredded Coconut and Red Beans

I was watching Bobby Chinn the other day at Discovery Travel and Living. His main cuisine is that of Vietnamese, however; during that episode, he was in Thailand and decided to create a Thai dessert: Mango sticky rice.

His version was simpler, he created the sticky rice with some coconut milk and place some diced mangoes beside it. As I watched him, his dessert reminded me much of our own Philippine sticky rice dish: the 'Biko".

With that in mind, I also created my own version of the mango sticky rice which is very similar with the biko.



First, get some sticky rice or 'malagkit' and cook it. You can easily find this in the grocery or in your local market. Then, as you cook the rice, get some mango and puree it.



Put that slice of mango in your blender and it must look like this.



Next, get a saucepan and heat the coconut milk with some sugar. Melt the sugar in it.



When the coconut mixture is ready, combine some of the mango puree and coconut mixture together. Set aside some coconut milk mixture. This will be your mixture for the mango sticky rice.



Mix the mango-coconut milk mixture with your sticky rice.



After mixing, just assemble it! It is pretty easy, the base is the mango sticky rice, then add some shredded coconut on top of it. To top everything, add some canned red beans. Pour some of the extra coconut milk beside the whole dish and there you go!



Opinion

First of all, what I like about this dish is that it's a local dish. All ingredients came from the Philippines, meaning, you can expect the quality of the ingredients be very good.

Second, the texture was better than I expected. It seems I undermined the texture of the sticky rice because I thought that it would be mushy, then again, it wasn't. A bite will give you a burst of texture of the sticky rice, shredded coconut and red beans. I felt the every bit of grain of rice there was and the texture of the three elements were quite unique and meld harmoniously with one another.

Lastly, the sharp sourness of the mango paired really well with the richness of the coconut milk. Moreover, the earthy bitter taste of the red beans gave a good balance with the overall sweetness of the dish. This gave a good balance to the dish.

All in all, I was surprised with the dish, it was better than I expected. I feel this dish was well executed and I was happy about it. :D