Easy Mango Sago Recipe

This easy mango sago recipe can be enjoyed either warm or cold.

Originally a cold dessert, mango sago is a Cantonese dessert with origins in Hong Kong, and is now a popular dessert across East and South East Asia. It's made with sago pearls (or sometimes tapioca pearls instead), rich coconut milk, and – of course – fresh mango.

Although sago and tapioca are often spoken about interchangeably and the latter sometimes used in place of the former, they're actually two different things. Sago is a starch made from the pith of sago palm trees (also known as a sago cycad). Tapioca is a starch made from cassava roots. But the texture of both is pretty much the same.

In fact, a lot of the time when you see sago being sold as dry little balls (sometimes called 'sago seeds') in a bag, it's actually made of tapioca starch, and isn't true sago. Real sago is actually brown in colour, but because it's more hassle to extract starch out of a tree than it is to do so out of a significantly smaller, easier-to-harvest root, tapioca has over time replaced sago, and is marketed as sago when in it's 'tiny white balls' form.

Either way, you can use sago or tapioca for this hot mango sago recipe, as long as they're the small 'seed' kind (not the big 'bubble tea' type of tapioca). I used to be able to find 'sago' quite easily in both western and Asian supermarkets, but nowadays I don't see it as often. In fact, that 'sago' was probably just tapioca labelled as sago all along because it was white in colour. So I just substitute it for more readily-available tapioca.

Mango sago pudding is most often served cold to help people cool off in hot and humid summers, but I also enjoy it served hot and fragrant during the chillier winter months. You can also either cook the mango in the coconut milk or blend it into the milk, or simply layer them separately in your serving bowl.

I also like to infuse the coconut milk with a pandan leaf, but this step is optional. If you want to serve this recipe cold, start by making the infused coconut milk so you can cool it down and chill it for a few hours before you make the sago. But since we're serving it hot this time, we're making it alongside the sago.

To serve mango sago hot, simply follow the steps below. To serve it cold, make the coconut milk and mango 'soup' first so you can chill it in the fridge for a few hours, and then make the sago when you're ready to serve it.

You can also watch me make this on my YouTube channel, Tashcakes:

Ready? Let's go.

(Serves two.)

Ingredients:

Two small handfuls of sago (or small tapioca pearls)
1 pandan leaf, knotted (optional)
3/4 can of full fat coconut milk
2 tbsp caster sugar
A pinch of salt
1 ripe mango, peeled and chopped

Method:

1. Bring a small saucepan of water to a simmer and add in your sago. Give it a stir and cook until the sago has become translucent (about 20 minutes). Sometimes the sago balls still has a tiny dot of white in the centre, but this is fine.

2. Put the coconut milk, sugar, salt, pandan leaf and mango (reserving a few mango chunks as a garnish for later) into a separate saucepan and heat on a low to medium heat until steaming. Cook gently for at least five minutes, or for the duration of your sago cooking, to allow the salt and sugar to dissolve and the pandan leaf to infuse, then discard the pandan leaf.

3. Discard the pandan leaf, and strain the sago through a fine sieve, rinsing the sago with cold water so the pearls don't stick together. Stir the sago into the coconut milk.

4. Divide between two bowls and place the remaining mango chunks on top. If you like, serve with an extra drizzling of thick coconut milk.

Enjoy, and have fun.