Hawaii's Share Your Table

This northern Thai classic combines sweet coconut milk with nutty, chewy sticky rice and the joyous flavor bursts of summer’s most perfect fruit.

When it's mango season, there's nothing better than this classic Thai dish of soft, gooey, coconut-flavored rice topped with slices of luscious, perfectly ripe mango. It's simply one of the best ways to eat a mango–aside from standing over the sink with juices running down your chin and arms!

Essential to this dish is Thai sticky rice, a medium- to long-grain variety that is starchy or glutinous. It's similar to mochi rice, a short-grain glutinous or sweet rice. Sticky rice is ubiquitous in northern and northeastern Thailand where it is the staple rice of the table. The rice is opaque white in color, almost chalky, before it is cooked.

When cooked, sticky rice sticks to itself but not to your hands. In Thailand, people roll a small clump into a ball with their fingers and use it to pick up pieces of food, like you would a tortilla chip. Or a ball of rice is dipped into sauces and eaten. Thai sticky rice is often served in covered baskets.

Like mochi rice, Thai sticky rice requires a good long soak–several hours or overnight is recommended. Sticky rice is steamed over simmering water in a cone-shaped basket steamer or cheesecloth-lined bamboo steamer; the rice should never touch the water. Once the rice is soaked, it steams in about 15 minutes; the grains become soft and translucent but remain chewy.

The coconut "sauce" for the rice is simply coconut milk, salt and sugar. While salt may seem unusual in a sweet dish, it provides a nice balance to the sweetness of the coconut milk, sugar and mangoes.

Choose mangoes that are at their peak of ripeness, firm, juicy and flavorful. After peeling the skin, find the "flat" sides of the mango and cut the sides off the seed. Slice each mango section into thin pieces and arrange them on top of the rice.

Plan ahead when making this dish since the rice requires an overnight soak. You could cook the rice ahead of time, store it in the refrigerator for a few days and reheat it in a microwave. Or, if at the last minute you decide to make this dish, soak the rice in very warm water for about 2 hours before steaming. Even though this dish is usually served at the end of a meal as a dessert, consider eating it as a meal in itself. It's filling, addictive and that good!