East African · Dessert
Mkate wa Sinia
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle.
Ingredients
- 300 g plain medium grain white rice, soaked 6 hours in cold water
- 500 ml coconut milk, 400 ml for the batter and 100 ml after the ferment
- 150 ml water
- 150 g caster sugar
- 5 g instant yeast
- 30 g rice flour
- 4 g ground cardamom
- 3 g fine salt
- 20 g ghee, for the tin
The skills inside
FermentationThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Drain the rice and blend it with 400 ml of the coconut milk and all the water until the batter is as smooth as double cream and you feel no grit when you rub a drop between finger and thumb.
- Whisk in the sugar, yeast and rice flour, cover, and leave at room temperature until the surface domes and breaks into bubbles and smells faintly sour, 3 hours to 4 hours. 180 min
- Stir it down and fold in the last 100 ml of coconut milk, the cardamom and the salt, to a batter that pours like thin cream.
- Pour into a ghee-greased 25 cm round tin to a depth of 3 cm and bake at 180C (350F) for 40 minutes to 45 minutes, until the top is bronzed and a skewer comes out clean. 40 min
- Cool it completely in the tin before cutting.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
The wobble & the skewer: testing a bake 135 recipes
- Tested at the true centre and the thickest point, not at the convenient edge: the edge is done long before the answer is.
- The skewer comes out as the recipe describes, clean and dry or carrying the stated moist crumb, and it does the same on a second test in a different spot.
- The wobble is read in motion: nudged, the centre moves as one set mass with a faint tremble, rather than a liquid ripple travelling across the surface.
- The other signs agree with the test: risen and just shrinking from the sides, the top set and dry to a light touch with no wet gloss on it.
- Pressed lightly at the middle it springs back and leaves no lasting dent.
Where it goes wrong It was judged on the clock and on how the edges looked, so a centre still liquid went to the rack and sank as it cooled, a dense wet seam under a perfectly browned top.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Demi-sec Champagne
- Also Right
- Off-dry Chenin (Vouvray)
- From the Taps
- Fruited sour
- Zero-Proof
- Coconut water with lime
Tropical sweetness wants bubbles or Chenin’s honeyed acid: richness met with lift, not more weight.
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