Like me, I’m sure plenty of you have seen the almost four-minute-long YouTube video of xoi chien phong — fried sticky rice ball — being made on a Vietnamese street corner. I was amazed at how just a couple simple ingredients were turning into a giant ball of puffed-up rice right before my eyes, which very quickly and very naturally turned into my need to recreate it. For the task of deeming whether of not we can do this, I’m using sticky rice, split mung beans, coconut milk, and sugar.
Getting that mixture to yield the perfect dough is of course a key step, but really the big hurdle here is what happens once we put the dough in hot oil — which is what is supposed to make our hockey puck-sized piece of dough expand.
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