Chek Khtis – Banana Coconut Milk Dessert
Chek Khtis – Khmer dessert
Chek Namva is a kind of typical banana in Cambodia which is used to create many kinds of snack and dessert. Chek Khtis or banana coconut milk dessert is a popular homemade dessert for Cambodian farmily. In some Khmer food restaurants in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap also serve Chek Khtis as dessert after lunch.
Chek Khtis is inexpensive and very easy to cook dessert. You might try it in your home kitchen follow the receipt below.
Choosing banana : Banana is the main ingredient for this dessert dish. The banana to be chosen for Chek Khtis is Chek Namva, which are selling in any market. The price is about 2,000 Riels (0.5USD) a hand (១ស្និត). The banana should be over ripe if you don’t like the soft flesh of banana after cooked. The skin should be well yellow, and the flesh should be moderate soft (when we touch it). But for those who like soft flesh banana, choose the riper one, it would be sweeter after cooked. The banana with yellow flesh would be sweeter. The banana with white flesh, normally would be a bit sour after cooked.
Ingredients and Preparation
- 1 hand of banana which might be about 14 fruits. Peel off the skin, slice the fruit length-wise into 2 parts, then slice across each part into 2 pieces. So that we get 4 pieces from each banana. After all we have a bowl of sliced banana pieces. Put in a little bit of salt, then shake it in the bowl, so that every piece of banana would be well mixed with salt. Keep it for 30mn. Salt increases the sweet taste of banana and the toughness of each piece. Some people would soak the banana in the salt water, then wash it out with water. Doing so, the original sweet taste of banana would be missed with water.
- 1kg of coconut meat. Put it into a big bowl, pour in 250ml of boiled water, then squeeze it to get the milk. Use a filter, so that the coconut meat will not drop into coconut milk. Keep it in a different small bowl. This first squeezed coconut milk will be serve raw by spraying on the surface of the dessert. After that add more clean water into the coconut meat bowl, then go on squeezing to get about 1 liter of coconut milk.
- 0.5 kg of sugar
- 100g of Batata flour. Wash it then soak in water for 30mn to make it soft. It’s a kind of hard flour make of batata, preserved as dessert ingredient only.
Chek Khtis Ingredients
Start Cooking
Pour into the pan 1 liter of coconut milk, put it on to fire. When it’s boiling, put in the soaked batata flour and banana in the same time. With moderate heat, cook it until the banana is well cooked. Then put in sugar to your desire sweet level.
When you prepare it in a small bowl for each person, cover it with 2 tablespoons of first time squeezed coconut milk. You can skip it, if you don’t like uncooked coconut milk. Some added a bit of pounded peanut.
Chek Khtis can be eaten alone or eaten with sticky rice.
Chek Khtis – Popular Khmer Homemade Dessert
Chek Khtis Bay Dam Nerb – Banana coconut milk dessert serve with sticky rice. I like this way of serving very much, it seems going well together.
