Sakhu sai mu

Small tapioca pearls worked into a dough with hot water, wrapped round a sweet-salty pork filling.

Pork. Not vegetarian — contains fish sauce, pork.

Ingredients

dough

• 300 g small tapioca pearls
• 280 ml boiling water
• 0.25 teaspoon salt

filling

• 300 g minced pork
• 80 g peanuts, roasted and crushed
• 4 tablespoons palm sugar
• 3 tablespoons fish sauce
• 6 shallots, finely chopped
• 4 coriander roots, pounded
• 1 teaspoon white pepper
• 2 tablespoons oil

Method

1. BOILING WATER INTO THE PEARLS, AND WORKED AT ONCE. Tapioca pearls only become a dough if the water is actually boiling: it gelatinises the outside of each pearl so they grip each other. Warm water gives a bowl of wet beads that will never hold together, and there is no recovering it.
2. Pour the water on in one go, stir hard with a spoon for 30 seconds, then cover for 10 minutes.
3. Knead it with oiled hands while it is still as hot as you can bear. Cooled, it stiffens and cracks instead of stretching.
4. SMALL PEARLS, not the large bubble-tea kind. Large ones never cook through in the middle of a dumpling and stay chalky.
5. Filling: fry the shallots and coriander root in the oil, 3 minutes; pork in, 5 minutes, broken up; palm sugar, fish sauce and pepper in and cooked down 5 minutes until sticky and almost dry.
6. Peanuts in at the end. Cool it completely -- warm filling softens the dough from the inside and the parcel splits in the steamer.
7. Roll the dough into 3 cm balls, flatten each in an oiled palm, a teaspoon of filling in, and close it over, pinching and rolling until the seam disappears.
8. Any gap lets water in and the dumpling collapses. Roll each one until it is smooth all round.
9. Steam 15 minutes on oiled paper, well apart, until the dough has turned from white to CLEAR. That transparency is the only reliable test.
10. Oil them lightly as they come out or they weld together, and serve with fried garlic, chilli and lettuce.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Thailand · All recipes