Pengat Durian with Sticky Rice

It is that time of the year! My favourite season! Yep, it’s the season of the thorny delicacy, the DURIAN! For those who know me, I absolutely LOVE durian. I love it in all forms, be it fresh, in a choux puff….I love cheap durian, I love expensive durian, and I love them frozen (they’re just like ice cream but made of 100% durian!). In this blog, I will share with you how to make a sweet and creamy Pengat Durian with Sticky Rice!

For the uninitiated, durian is an oval-shaped fruit with a tough exterior of menacing spikes, often olive green in colour. Inside, you will find its jewel of sweet, custard-like flesh with a slightly bitter taste that can range in colour from pale yellow to saffron orange with large seeds. This otherworldly appearance is matched by its potent aroma that often precedes the taste. Many can’t stand the smell and describe it as akin to something rotting. I feel a little sorry for the people who can’t appreciate durian in all its olfactory magnificence. But that’s ok, more durian for me then!

Smells aside, let’s talk about the nutrition in this fruit. The King of Fruit is naturally rich in Vitamin C, iron and potassium and it’s also high in fibre. It helps improve muscle strength, and skin health and also lowers blood pressure! We are talking about a super fruit here, but as with all sweet things, eat moderately! 

Singaporeans love durian so much that even our arts centre, The Esplanade is nicknamed #thedurian, due to its architectural feature of sharp metal shards which Singaporeans instantly associated with the durian. If you see the pictures below, you will understand.

Okay, allow me to introduce to you a classic Malay dessert using durian, a pengat durian. Many families will buy lots of durian and will feast together on the floor (protected by old newspapers) at home. Sometimes, we may get some durian which turn out dry or unripe, or durian which are bland and not sweet at all. Many Malay households have a low-waste policy, especially when it comes to food, so we will never throw away an otherwise perfect durian. All dry and bland durians will be kept in the fridge and will be turned into this magnificent but simple dessert the very next day! In fact, if you have space in your freezer, you can gather them there and make this dessert after you have a fair amount of them. This is especially useful when you crave durian but they are off season! Moral of the story is: always have durian in the freezer! 

For this video, I had specially gone and bought a beautiful durian so the amount of sugar is pretty low. If you are using bland durian, you would need to increase the gula melaka by a fair amount. Keep tasting as the pengat softens on the stove so you can adjust.

One of the best things about pengat durian is that it is basically a festival of smells and flavours. Obviously you get that lovely, sweet and heavenly durian aroma, but we will also add some knotted pandan leaves to perfume this dessert even further. Speaking of pandan, I will definitely be doing a blog post about Asia’s answer to vanilla, soon-ish! And when making the sticky (glutinous) rice, I love lining the steamer with banana leaf (more pleasant aroma!) and I’ll also throw in another knot of pandan leaves so the fragrance is as enticing as you can imagine!  

Pengat durian is traditionally served warm. To me, pengat is pure comfort food! It is cooked with coconut milk and sweetened with brown palm sugar or gula Melaka. There are many versions of pengat such as pengat pisang (banana), pengat keledek (sweet potato) which are saucier or runnier. But today, I will be making Pengat Durian with Sticky Rice.

Butterfly Pea Flower

Pengat durian can be slurped gleefully on its own but sometimes we eat it with bread (use it for dipping) or with a side of sticky or glutinous rice. I love sticky rice because it’s so sticky and starchy and I am a carb-loving girl through and through! To make the sticky rice extra special, I will be dyeing it with foraged Bunga telang or butterfly pea flowers.

In Malay, Indonesian and Peranakan cuisine, this flower is often used to naturally tint rice and desserts such as kuih lapis and pulut. It does not have any strong flavour so it is perfect as a natural colouring agent. The colour stays vivid after cooking, too. I personally prefer to dye the sticky rice with streaks of blue so that the sticky rice is both white and blue, reminding me of white and blue Chinese pottery. I find rice that is tinted completely blue not as attractive and, to be honest, a little disconcerting but that’s just me. 

Bunga telang (Clitoria Ternatea) is a creeper plant with strikingly beautiful indigo blue flowers. In Singapore, it can be easily found in gardens, roadside and growing in the wild or cultivated in people’s gardens both high-rise or ground level. For this shoot, I’ve foraged mine by the roadside near the studio kitchen!

This flower contains antioxidant compounds that are responsible for its distinctive colour.  You may have seen videos of the amazing blue pea flower tea which starts off with a gorgeous shade of blue and when you add lemon or any citrus juice, the tea amazingly changes colour and turns  into vivid violet! This small, lovely flower also comes in dried form, so whenever you need them for your next dish or as a refreshing beverage, you can get them in Asian supermarkets or iHerb without having to scour through the bushes😂

To get that gorgeous indigo blue you would want to extract the liquid from the fresh butterfly pea flower. I’ve used a pestle and mortar to basically crush the flowers to a pulp with some water. You will end up with a blue paste, ready to be used. If you do not have fresh butterfly pea flowers, make an extraction using the dried flowers. Simply soak one part of petals in three parts of boiling water and 15 minutes later, do exactly the same this, crush completely in the mortar and pestle.

Cooking Sticky Rice or Glutinous Rice in the Rice Cooker

I have to admit that for the longest time (around 18 years) in my married life, we’ve never had a rice cooker. I always find my kitchens too small to fit in a rice cooker and I am the type who loves her counter space. Plus I’m so used to cooking rice on the stove so it’s not a handicap for me. All that changed when we were setting up the Studio Kitchen for Mel Makes. We got ourselves a rice cooker! And almost immediately, I fell in love with it! So easy and convenient! I mean, what took me so long!? I’ve cooked so many dishes with the rice cooker to date and I am sure I will continue using it in many more videos!

Ok, on to the sticky rice. Sticky rice or glutinous rice is a type of rice that is commonly grown in Southeast Asia and East Asia. It becomes sticky when cooked because of its high amount of amylopectin. Especially in Singapore, we mainly import glutinous rice from Thailand! After cleaning and rinsing, I soak the rice in water for about 2 hours. Most rice cookers have a sticky rice (or Glutinous Rice or Sweet Rice) function and come with a steam basket and that’s what I’ve used here. I lined the basket with banana leaf and brushed the surface and the side of the basket with some cooking oil.  

After draining the water out, add rice into the basket and toss with salt. Now here comes the fun part, add drops of the butterfly pea paste to the rice and if you like, give a light stir to spread the blue dye around the rice. You can definitely adjust the intensity of the colour! Want it bluer, add more paste, Want it ALL BLUE? Make more paste and toss it with the rice until everything turns blue!

Before cooking it in the rice cooker, I took 2 pandan leaves, tied them together into a knot and pushed it into the rice. As you can tell, the sticky rice is gonna smell amazing! You need to add water to the rice cooker to steam and to hasten the process, I’ve added freshly-boiled water into the rice cooker before adding the steamer basket and pressing “COOK”. Let the rice cooker do its magic! PRO TIP: Do follow the instructions that come with your rice cooker. Also, take note that cooking sticky rice will take longer than cooking normal rice so get the sticky rice cooking first before you start on the pengat. My batch of 3 cups of glutinous rice took more than an hour in the rice cooker.

An optional step in making it shiny and glossy. At the end of the cooking cycle, open the rice cooker and stir in one tablespoon of cooking oil. And there you have it: royally glossy sticky rice fit for your most indulgent King of Fruits pengat! 

The Proof is in the Pengat!

Pengat, being borne of a low-waste kitchen, is normally made without the use of any form of measurements. We cook it when there’s excess durian or extra bananas. But I’ve written it all down and I hope that it will help anyone out there who is new to making this heavenly dessert.

You will need a medium-sized pot and everything goes in at the same time. Start it at medium high heat and once it starts bubbling, reduce to medium-low to let the durian soften and meld with the coconut cream. Stir occasionally until it is thick in consistency or until you notice the flesh of durian has started to fall off from the seeds. This can roughly take around 20-30 minutes!

Taste your pengat durian. It has to be quite sweet with a touch of salt for balance. Remember that you will be serving this with sticky rice which is unsweetened and salted so make sure the pengat is SWEET, you will not regret it! 

To serve (fancily), line your plate with a fresh banana leaf. Scoop the warm white and blue sticky rice into a small rice bowl and unmould it onto your serving plate. Pour the beautiful warm pengat durian over the sticky rice. Garnish with some fresh butterfly pea petals and enjoy!

And there you have it, Pengat Durian with Sticky Rice!