For anyone having visited Laos or Isaan in Northeast Thailand, you’ve eaten sticky rice.
Traditionally this rice is soaked for hours, then steamed in a woven bamboo basket over a pot, like this:
That’s obviously completely impractical in a Western kitchen, so I tried to do the rice in my steamer. That turned out to be completely impractical, because the rice glued itself to the steamer tray.
Well, it turns out you can make khao neow in a Zojirushi rice cooker. I recommend sourcing your rice cooker at https://yumasia.co.uk. Donna and Neil, the founders, have both excellent products and the customer service is amazing. They gave me these instructions:
You should use glutinous short grain rice, use the ‘white rice’ setting and use the long grain water scale on the inner bowl. You will need to adjust the water level though (add more water) – 1 cup of glutinous rice needs 1.5 cups of water (so fill to the 1.5 mark on the long grain scale), 2 cups needs 2.5 cups of water. This should give you good glutinous/sticky rice to eat with Khao Neow Mamuang.
They also have a food blog for rice cooker recipes:
www.greedypanda.co.uk.