Recipe: Chef Sarab's Mango Sago

Sago pudding usually combines tapioca or sago pearls with coconut milk or thick milk and fresh fruit. It is cooked up in a variety of ways across Southeast Asia.

Chef Sarab Kapoor chooses to make it with two types of fruit and uses a melon baller to create perfect spheres of the fruit. Her watermelon-mango pudding, with its vivid hues, instantly attracts and will have several takers.

Deliciously sweet, the cool dessert has six ingredients and can feed a crowd. Add further freshness with a garnish of mint sprigs and additional scoops of fresh fruit to her Mango Sago.

For a healthier version, replace the sugar with jaggery powder, palm sugar or honey. Sago pudding can also be conjured up with a mixture of coconut milk and condensed milk or any nut-based milk.

Chef Sarab calls herself a food lover, television personality, cookbook author, among other descriptors.

Mango Sago

Serves: 6

Ingredients

• ½ cup sabudana or sago pearls, soaked in water for 15-20 minutes
• 1 cup coconut milk
• ¼ cup sugar, adjust as per the sweetness of the mango
• ½ cup mango puree
• Scoops or balls of mango and watermelon, for the topping
• Pudina or mint sprigs, to garnish
• Water
• 6 dessert bowls

Method

• Bring about a cup of water to boil, over medium heat, in a saucepan.
  Drain the soaked sago and add it to the boiling water.
  Keep stirring continuously till the sago turns transparent and no white specks are seen.
  Take off heat, drain and wash the sago pearls in a sieve to rid it of the excess starch.
  Keep aside.
• In another saucepan, heat the coconut milk with the sugar over low heat.
  Keep stirring until the sugar dissolves.
  Add the cooked sago to the coconut milk, lightly stir and take off heat.
  Mix in the mango puree.
  Let the mixture chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or more.
  Before serving, pour the sago pudding into dessert bowls and top with the scoops/balls of mango and watermelon.
  Garnish with mint sprigs and serve.

Editor's Note: In this pudding a range of fruit will work -- berries, melons, pineapples, slices of litchis, tiny cubes of banana, stone fruits like plums, peaches, apricots, cherries.

Instead of mango puree, try pineapple puree, strawberry puree, lime puree and other fruit purees.

Top the dessert with toasted coconut pieces. You could consider adding food colouring to get different colours.

Chef Sarab Kapoor lives in Singapore.

• MORE AWESOME RECIPES