Khao Niao Mamuang is a lesson in balance — sweet, salty, sour, and impossibly fragrant, all on a banana leaf.
In Thailand, the arrival of mango season is a civic event. Market stalls overflow with Ataulfo mangoes in late April, their skins still flushed with green, the flesh inside the colour of a sunset. Street vendors begin the first preparations — washing glutinous rice, cracking open coconuts — and the city knows: summer has arrived.
The preparation of khao niao mamuang is deceptively simple. Glutinous rice is soaked overnight, then steamed over a double boiler or banana leaves. A sauce of coconut milk, palm sugar, and sea salt is prepared separately, then poured over the warm rice. The salt is not an afterthought; it is the whole point — the counterweight that makes the sweetness sing rather than cloy.
'Eating this should feel like being somewhere warmer than you are.' — Koko.
The mango must be ripe but not overripe. The Thai call the correct state ngom — a word that implies a just-so-ness, a ripeness achieved and then held, briefly, at its peak. To serve an underripe mango with sticky rice is to disrespect the rice. To serve an overripe one is to waste the season.
Koko sources her mangoes from a family grove in Chiapas, Mexico, where the same Ataulfo variety grows. She serves them on banana leaves cut from a plant in her kitchen, a small flourish that makes the plate smell, faintly, of the tropics.
'Eating this,' she writes in her recipe notes, 'should feel like being somewhere warmer than you are.'