The last ditch

Saturday night market in Little India, Kuala Lumpur

If you could choose your last meal in a country, what would it be?

It’s a much more concrete question than some imagined last supper: unless you’re on death row or about to commit suicide then chances are you’ll have no power over the menu for your last meal, making it a question barely worth mooting as often as it is mooted. Most people who are executed don’t get any choice (contrary to the American myth) and being on your death bed also tends not to elevate the appetite. What the “last supper” question is really asking is “what is the best that you’ve already eaten?” from which the questioner is meant to discern the palate of the questioned or at least receive an answer pre-fried in nostalgia.

As for a last meal in Malaysia, what I’d do is bury myself neck-deep in a crowd and eat whatever the locals are chowing down upon, preferably in an open air environment.

Which is what I did.

The Saturday night market in Kuala Lumpur’s Little India could not be more packed without the crowd trampling each other to death ensuring that some in their midst had died whilst consuming their last meal. The food draws ecumenically from Malaysia’s street food faiths making it a great destination to either bone up on your knowledge of regional specialties or revisit the greatest hits of your time in Malaysia. There is also a great deal of street food that seems to be of questionable provenance, by far the most dangerous of meals.

Witness roti tarbus, a spicy Sloppy Joe made from a sweet white bun stuffed with minced, chilli-infused meat and wrapped entirely in a thin layer of fried egg.

Once again, Asia seems to be at the forefront of perfecting variations on American classics. The mix of chilli and fried egg is one of the world’s great flavour combinations in a one handed food.

Roti kebab is kebab meat fresh from the rotating pole, served up in a sweet bun topped with a squirt of commercial mayonnaise and a dose of barbecue sauce. Saccharine and squishy.

Fried chicken gets the stringy-looking outer coating from shreds of galangal, that lesser, woodier cousin of ginger; and is served in Styrofoam clamshells to be eaten elsewhere.

On the more traditional front, this stall is among the handful of street vendors outside of Penang to be serving Penang-style assam laksa, doling out both bowls and thin plastic bags. This version was tartly sour and thin but judging from the crowd and the near impossibility of procuring a seat on the communal tables behind the stall, this is the way that Kuala Lumpurites like it.

With a full stomach, I left Malaysia on the bus to Singapore, then onto Tiger Airways redeye to Melbourne, Australia via Darwin.

After almost three years, I’m home and it’s weird.

Satay and fondue, together at last

I never tire of regional novelties like cooking a skewer of something in a boiling pot of satay sauce, which constitutes something of a specialty in Melaka (Malacca), Malaysia and is the raison d’etre of Capitol Satay. This style of satay, satay celup, was (as far as I can find) invented by the owners of Capitol Satay in the 1950s and continues to be a reason for Kuala Lumpurites to drive down to Melaka to eat a morsel on a stick.

Capitol Satay on Lorong Bukit China is packed with satay-boiling punters from the moment it opens around 5:30pm until whatever ungodly hour that it closes. Pick from a random and wide array of skewered components from their refrigerator, ranging from meats to quail eggs to tofu and wontons, take a seat and wait for a roiling pot of peanut sauce to arrive at your table and present you with a new opportunity to burn yourself on a rich and sticky fluid.

The result: not as tasty as it is downright fun. The flavours of your chosen components barely make a dent in the satay sauce’s nuttiness, and conversely, very few of the components (apart from bread and tofu) soak up much sauce. I’m still positive that I lost a wonton in the sauce’s simmering brown depths never to be seen again.

Location:Capitol Satay Celup, 41, Lorong Bukit China, Melaka (Malacca), Malaysia

Cendol and pearls

These green worms are cendol (pronounced chen-dul), made from green pea flour flavoured with pandan leaves. They’re essential for making the dish that is their eponym: a combination of the worms, shaved ice, santan (the first extraction of coconut milk), gula (palm sugar) and often red beans. With a dish so simple, the only key is finding a vendor who uses top quality ingredients.

The same vendor selling the cendol had (what I’m guessing are) tapioca pearls, dyed red. From a distance I thought that they were pomegranate arils, but on closer inspection, they clearly were not.

Any suggestions?

See Also: The Star Online provides a recipe for cendol.

Kota Bharu’s Central Market

The central octagonal hall of Kota Bharu’s central market (Pasar Siti Khadijah) opens up like a cathedral devoted to the veneration of fresh Malaysian produce. A skylight illuminates the scene in a dull sepia glow throughout the day; upper levels providing a birds-eye view of the myriad proceedings below. By the crowded standard of Malaysia’s wet markets, Kota Bharu market has an overwhelming sense of austerity in comparison.

A while ago EatingAsia rhetorically asked whether you’d consider moving for a wet market, and for this one, I probably would. I ended up lingering for a few extra days in Kota Bharu just for the food, dropping by the market’s outstanding food hall for my curry fix. I had expected that Penang would be the sort of place that I could settle in, but not this northeastern corner of peninsular Malaysia. Maybe I could overlook the Kelantan state’s dominant but declining political party toying with the idea of hudud law. Maybe I could dismiss the concomitant lack of a brewery.

The ground floor plays host to primarily vegetable sellers on raised platforms with meats confined to the darker outer rim.

Keropok lekor, grey tubes of fish paste and starch, are probably one of the world’s least attractive foods in their pre-fried form. These snakes of sticky paste are sliced diagonally and then deep fried; giving a little crispness on the outer edges and chewiness to the centre. The flavour (in this case) is unrelenting fish.

I am always impressed by the effortlessness and economy by which people can clean a fish with a meat cleaver without destroying it. Any time I’ve tried it myself, I end up reverting back to a more flexible knife to peel out the chunks of fillet that I’ve missed entirely. The above method involved cutting the fish along the fillet on each side, then cleaving the head cleanly in two, so that the buyer received exactly half a fish, sans-innards.

See also:To Market, to market event at A Scientist in the Kitchen

A sea of tea

I know very little about tea, apart from what you learn by osmosis from your Anglo-Australian grandparents. I can make a decent cup of black tea but tend to regard it as a sort of beverage bycatch; something that fits well alongside pho or yum cha or fruitcake. I have no idea how it is grown, processed or traded in large quantities. I was in Tanah Rata in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands and this emboldened me to find out.

The general image of smiling, passive locals hand-picking tea that is planted by unscrupulous tea advertisers the world over is as wrong as it is Orientalist. Most of the tea in the Cameron Highlands is semi-mechanically harvested. Two people standing each side of the row of tea drag the above device across the new shoots, which slices and blows the fresh tea into a bag. Less accessible bushes on the mountain peaks and the depths of the ravines are still harvested by hand, but this represents an absolute minority of the total tea produced. In lowland plantations, a modified combine harvester drives over the top of the rows. The tea is allowed to resprout fresh tips that are then reharvested about every three weeks.

Once picked, the leaves are withered, crushed, torn and curled by machine then set aside to oxidise. The oxidation process is called “fermentation” for purely historical reasons as nothing ferments. The tea, now turned from green to black from oxidation, is dried, sorted, tasted and packed.

The found pepper of Cambodia

What does the visit of Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan to Angkor Wat in 1297, Khmer Rouge kidnappings and the recent landgrabbing of Okhna Ly Yong Phat in rural Sre Ambel, Cambodia have in common?

Cambodian pepper: which is how I tenuously link them all together in this month’s Chile Pepper magazine (US). With photos from Austin Bush it promises the best collaboration since Snoop Dogg recorded “Ain’t Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang” with Dr Dre.

The Wok Hei Economy

One of the great mysteries of eating in Penang is the economics of the hawker center. A group of vendors cluster around a kedai kopi, a cafe serving drinks and work almost independently of the cafe. Some pay rent, others are owned by the cafe, some seem to have agglomerated at a single point in an organic manner like a coral reef of wok burners accumulating on a restaurant atoll. The cafe often provides electricity and an awning to make monsoonal downpours tolerable for the vendors. Each cluster of vendors seems to be in competition, but there is value in assuring that the competing stalls all perform good business, thus attracting overflowing customers to your stall. The proper etiquette seems to be to order at the vendor at the front, then at least buy a single drink from the roaming waiter so that the kedai kopi owner gets their piece of the action.

Two hawker centres loom large. The Lorong Selamat center (above), with its reputation for serving the best char kway teow in Penang (and by inference, the world) and the ramshackle collection of hawkers on Swatow Lane (for ABC Special and Ice Kacang), just off Jalan Burma.

I’m apprehensive about the approach to anything as hyped and as personal as this char kway teow (above). I tend to place more value on the nubs of deep-fried pork fat, prawns and cockles that go into the dish (and the smoky wok hei flavour), than I value the core element: noodles. The noodles here are creamy and soak up charcoal smoke aplenty, a real lardy highlight. The only valid criticism is price. At RM7.50, the dish is roughly double the price of the average plate of char kway teow on Penang, a point that locals tend to debate and then eat on Lorong Selamat anyhow. It is too good not to eat there and the price serves as a talking point rather than deterrent.

We finished with a plate of lor bak, marinated lean pork wrapped in bean curd skin then deep-fried, served with a starchy bowl of broth thickened with egg and another bowl of chilli sauce. In this case, it was plated on top of an array of other deep fried delights and a local sausage.

Location: 84 Lorong Selamat, Penang, Malaysia

Triangulating Gurney Drive

Searing satay at Gurney Drive Hawker Center.

Gurney Drive’s Hawker Center is a roughly triangular lot encircled (entriangled?) by the most diverse set of street food vendors that you’ll find anywhere in Malaysia, alongside the mudflat-facing promenade. The road was named after Sir Henry Gurney, Malaya’s High Commissioner whose brief reign ended in 1951 when he was entriangled by Communist guerillas during the Malayan Emergency, and shot, allegedly sacrificing himself to draw fire away from his wife and driver. Unlike the sludgy foreshore, the hawker center does him no disrespect.

It smells of fried goods, dried squid, hae ko paste, laksa leftovers, and tourists. Despite being at the more commercial end of hawker spectrum, it is worth a visit just for the sheer variety available in a single, crowded venue. It is a place to begin trying to define what constitutes Malaysian street food in its infinite forms or just to establish a baseline, the culinary denominator for future Penang hawker meals.

At first, I started with a plan of moving from savory dishes to sweet-savory to sweets, with a palate-cleansing dried squid somewhere in between.

Within minutes this plan had fallen apart.

Popiah (above) has its origins in Fujian cuisine, with the Straits Chinese version made from a thin wheat flour pancake wrapping sliced jicama, bean curd, prawn and crab meat. This one was a little light on the crab…

…but the vendor had a perfect economy of movement in making them. There is value in eating food that is as entertaining to watch being constructed as it is to consume.

I passed on this dried squid, being too huge.

By all rights, muar chee (above) should not be as delicious as it looks. The vendor pulls a gelatinous blob of glutinous rice flour dough from a warmer, a blob which reminded me a little of the game pods from David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ.

She then proceeded to toss them into a perspex case filled with sugar, crushed peanuts and sesame seeds; dicing the blob whilst mixing and coating with the sweet/savory powder. The topping of dry-fried onions adds a crispy counterpoint to the chewiness of the rice flour.

This seafood curry mee has all the right elements: juicy prawns, a few blood cockles, opaque slices of pickled squid, congealed chunks of blood, and luscious chunks of fried tofu soaking up the curry broth. But it didn’t come together. The broth lacked the richness to carry the rest of the ingredients.

Chee cheong fun division of labor

I had a friend email me every few weeks to receive status updates on the amount and quality of chee cheong fun that I was consuming. Hello, Vin. The version of the dish that I’m more familiar with comes via Hong Kong with translucent sheets of noodle covering minced pork and prawns, topped with a light soy sauce.

The Penang chee cheong fun is even simpler. Sheets of noodle are rolled and sliced, then topped with local prawn paste hae ko, sesame seeds, and depending on your preference for heat, chili sauce.

No amount of eating can prepare you for the surprise of Penang rojak. What lies beneath the glossy, piquant and pungent shrimp sauce? Fruit? Seafood? In this case, both. The fruits of the sea came in the form of pickled squid; fruits from a tree in the form of green mango, papaya, starfruit and rose apple. The pineapple comes from a bromeliad which marks the outer edge of my botanical knowledge.

Rojak is a dish that shouldn’t fit together. There are too many elements, all of which vie for your attention: the diametrically opposed texture of squid and rose apple; sourness from green mango and lime juice (?); the trenchant odor of shrimp. But it works.

Location:Gurney Drive, Penang

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The Last Appetite

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