Freshly Brewed Malabi

May 12

Pastry Chef Katie Fair transforms East Side Banh Mi’s toasted peanut rice milk coffee into a creamy coconut malabi.

When a James Beard dinner brought the Butcher & Bee and East Side Banh Mi teams together, Pastry Chef Katie Fair was in charge of the dessert course.

“I was allowed to do whatever I wanted,” she says. “So I thought it would be cool to collaborate with [East Side Banh Mi Chef and Co-Owner Gracie Nguyen].” Gracie often releases special desserts and beverages, like their toasted peanut rice milk coffee. Featuring Nguyen Coffee Supply, a Vietnamese-focused roasting company by Rising Stars alum Sahra Nguyen, the robust coffee is mixed with three milks: creamy sweetened condensed milk, a horchata-like rice milk, and a salted peanut milk. Rather than replicate the iced beverage, Fair fused it with a dish she’d already built the skeleton for —a coconut malabi (full recipe here).

A take on Israeli milk pudding, Fair’s malabi acts as the ideal blank canvas for seasonal flavors. “Coconut is a tropical fruit, but it’s a neutral [flavor] in the vegan world,” she says.

“You can flavor it in so many ways.” With three dominating flavors coming into play (coffee, rice, and peanut), Fair needed to be sure that this iteration didn’t completely overwhelm the coconut pudding itself. “I knew I wanted the majority of the flavor profile to be the coffee. That took me a while to dial in. I had to keep adding coffee until I got that right ratio.” She reduced a big pot of coconut milk by half, added vanilla, sugar, and enough freshly brewed Nguyen espresso so that the deep, chicory notes shined through, and then reduced it more and more until it became thick and glossy.

Once the malabi stabilized, she poured in a soft, sticky coconut caramel. “I always want a sauce on my dessert, so I knew this would connect to the coconut milk,” says Fair. Then it needed a texture—something to harken back to the coffee’s almost-chewy mouthfeel. “Peanut and rice milk give the drink an almost textural quality, so I knew I wanted to do something crunchy and popping out.” So she made a Cracker-Jack-like caramel brittle from puffed rice and peanuts, delicate enough to crack with a spoon as a guest dips into their pudding. But after tastings with Butcher & Bee Chef Bryan Lee Weaver, the team decided that it was missing a core component: acid. So Fair added rehydrated cherries, infused with lime and rum to the peanut-rice-coffee equation. ‘It’s funny, because I always end up making peanut butter and jelly,” she says. “That’s my favorite flavor combination!”

The dessert was such a hit that it stayed on the Butcher & Bee menu through the fall and winter.

But come spring, she’ll run a new rendition of the coconut malabi. Though Fair isn’t ready to say farewell to this mashup dessert for good. “It’s a crowd pleaser. I’ll always keep this one in my back pocket.”