Recipes for Dummies

Often referred to as sticky or sweet rice (gap nep), these grains are soaked for several hours, sometimes overnight, before cooking.  Glutinous rice comes in both long and short grain varieties.  The long grain is used for both savoury and sweet dishes, such as the popular porridge-style dishes or short grain is favoured for dumplings, puddings and festive sweets.  In contrast to long grain rice, the highly polished, glutinous rice grain is an opaque white colour due to the starch content when raw and turns translucent when cooked.  Although the grains retain a degree of firmness, they do tend to stick to one another, thus lending themsleves ideally to being handled in clumps and moulded into balls to dip into a sauce, or to be flavoured with a dollop of sweet bean paste, to be used as fillings for cakes wrapped in banana leaves.  In the street of Vietnam and Cambodia, glutinous rice is often eaten as a filling snack, sweetened with a little coconut milk and sugar sprinkled over the top.