Category Archives: Bits and Pieces: Cooking 101

Project Hokkien Mee: The Pursuit of Excellence

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Friendships should be rated on the Fried Hokkien Mee Index.  A love for the thick noodles coated in silky black sauce, glistening with lard, with its smoky heady scent pushes one to the highest Friends-I-Can-Count-On-To-Name-Their-First-Child/Demon-After-Me rank while a response along the lines of “You mean the pale fried noodles served with prawns ah?….Yum yum…I tried it in Singapore!” gets one relegated to the Losers-I-Can-Count-On-To-Text-Me-While-They’re-In-The-Loo rank.  Not happening.

One such person on the FICCOTNTFCDAM rank is HairyBerry.  For as long as I can remember, our conversations have been peppered with the two most wonderful words known to mankind (“hokkien” and “mee”, in case I lost you at “lard” above) and eventually, it seemed like the natural progression of things to move on to the next level of our relationship.

We decided to cook hokkien mee together.

Sans recipe and equipped with only the memory of our hokkien mee-eating experiences, we met up early one morning to shop for ingredients.  Not at the grime-ridden Selayang market, no sirree, but at the Village Grocer in Bangsar Village where one can find diced fried pork lard packaged in neatly stacked transparent plastic containers.  There was a fair bit of quibbling about the ingredients that were required for our project as well as  the quantities required, but we finally managed to come to an agreement and stocked up on the following items:

For the noodles:

Dark soy sauce
Light soy sauce
Oyster sauce
Fried pork skin
A tub of lard
Shallots – sliced
Garlic – sliced
Chinese cabbage – chopped roughly
Pork bone stock
Pork loin – sliced thinly
Prawns – peeled and deveined
Dried flatfish powder

For sambal belacan:

Red chillies
Belacan
Sugar
Lime

The experiment was conducted at our super secret air conditioned hokkien mee laboratory which was devoid of charcoal and wok in true city-dwelling style.  The objective was to prove that 1) one can cook hokkien mee at home on a small gas burner without a wok; 2) anyone can cook; and 3) Village Grocer is heaven.

The shallots were sliced finely, then cooked with the pork lard to create a fragrant infused oil.  While that was being prepared, we fried the pork loin in the pan, then removed it and set it aside.  The same process applied to the prawns.  We also blended the red chillies with belacan to make the sambal belacan.  A little sugar was added to this paste.  This was then fried with oil until the oil separated.

The stage was set.

Using a combination of cooking oil and lard, we fried some shallots and garlic in the frying pan, and then poured in some stock.  In went the various sauces until the broth achieved the right colour, consistency and flavour, after which we threw in all the other prepared ingredients, the infused oil and the noodles.  At this point, the noodles were left to braise in the covered frying pan for several minutes until the sauce thickened.  More crunchy pieces of fried pork skin were added at the final point.

We made three batches, and all three batches tasted different thanks to our “agak-agak” style of cooking.  One batch was horridly bitter due to the liberal amount of dark soy sauce used, while another tasted quite close to the original thing.  We learnt that the braising time was important, as was the quality of the noodles used.  One batch turned out too soft and lacked bite as a result of the long braising time.

Lessons were learnt that day, and we certainly didn’t expect perfect hokkien mee.  On hindsight, perhaps we should have allowed some of our sweat to spill into the pan.  We should have probably drunk more wine while cooking too, because I have learnt that I do my best cooking when I am inebriated.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rank our hokkien mee a 5.  Hairy and I will probably still be talking for years to come about our favourite hokkien mee stalls in KL and PJ, and we will probably not be embarking on another hokkien mee project in the next 36 months or so unless someone pays us a lot of money.

It’s a thankless job.  Cooking, that is.  How often do we thank our mums/dads who have had to plan daily menus and have had to ensure sufficient variety to avoid boredom at the dining table?  I now understand how important it is to be thanked for food; it is an affirmation, not of your cooking skills (which you may possibly have little of), but of the effort that went into the preparation of a meal that can only come from the heart.

Oh, and Village Grocer is heaven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Pot of Gold – Bacon Jam

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When I mentioned my obsession with bacon to my brother who lives in the UK, he sniffed, “We don’t eat bacon for breakfast these days.  It’s peasant food.”

I’d like to see him tell mum that.  She lives in Klang, a place she claims is barren of good bacon.  I am literally expected to bring home the bacon every time I visit, failing which she’d serve me broth without any bread and whip me soundly before putting me to bed.

I am an internet junkie, reading anything from Malaysiakini to Martha Stewart’s Delicious Food Recipes, and one day I chanced upon Martha Stewart’s bacon jam recipe.  It involved using a slow cooker, something which I didn’t have at that time, so I put it off to another day.  I eventually bought myself a cheap 3.3 litre slow cooker, and my culinary journey took a different, but positive direction from then on.

The reception towards my homemade bacon jam varied greatly.  Some said it tasted like siu pau (barbecued pork bun) and politely told me that it was marketable, while my mum said perceptively, “There’s alcohol in it, Meena”.  It would have been okay except that she suffers from alcohol intolerance (she breaks out in rashes), and being the good daughter that I am, I fed her not only the bacon jam made with 15-year-old single malt whisky, but also a boozey tiramisu later that night.  Relax.  The amounts were negligible anyway, hardly enough to cause a small bump in the skin, and she slept well that night.

Ironically enough, I didn’t use the slow cooker to make the bacon jam in the end.  The problem with the slow cooker recipe is that one needs to cook it for 3 1/2 to 4 hours on high (or probably about 6 hours on low), but I work in an accounting firm with minimum working hours of 12 hours a day which basically meant that 1) I can never get a tan; and 2) I can never cook bacon jam in a slow cooker.

I followed the ingredients in the recipe to a T, so it’s pointless reproducing it here, but the steps obviously differ because of the no-slow cooker thingy.  After frying the bacon, onions and garlic, and adding cider vinegar, maple syrup, sugar and coffee, I cooked it over low heat on the stove for about an hour, then cooled it down before blitzing it in the food processor till I got it to my preferred consistency.  It then went back to the stove again before I added in a glug of whisky and simmered it for a further 15 minutes. (Note: There is no mention of whisky in the Martha Stewart version, but I think it should be in as it makes a world of a difference.  It’s non-halal already anyway, innit?)

The bacon jam goes wonderfully with cheeses and roast meats.  I even ate it with mum’s nasi lemak last weekend, whereupon mum bestowed upon me her biggest frown for contaminating a much revered local favourite with the likes of Martha Stewart.  Mum’s a stickler for tradition, and I’m a rebel, but she humours me anyway.  Well, sometimes.

I still have some left over in my fridge, this beautiful pot of gold with its sticky, smoky, syrupy, delectable relish.   I asked a dear friend once, in rhetoric, about my elusive rainbow and pot of gold.  She said, “It will get better.  Just focus on the now”.  And I did just that.

“No more did I need to roam.
In all that time I was searching for that pot of gold,
It was with my family and friends, at home.”

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Penne with Anchovies, Wagyu and CHOCOLATE

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I looked at the block of chocolate which Paprika gave me as a souvenir from London, uncertain how to react.  “This is so generous of you, but I don’t bake, Paps,” I said meekly and pushed it back to her.  “You take it and bake me something with it lah!”   For something so precious, I couldn’t bear to accept it and leave it in my refrigerator, untouched for the next 20 years.

“You can cook savoury dishes with it oso what,” she said.

That’s an idea, I thought.   So I accepted her kind gift, and then left it in my refrigerator, untouched for the next 3 months.   My fridge is like a black hole.  Nothing survives.  Nothing escapes.  Nothing comes out.

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I forgot all about the chocolate until a few days back when I turned on the TV and I saw David Rocco’s Dolce Vita where he echoed what Paps said.   “You can cook savoury dishes with chocolate oso what.”   It was like a voice from the heavens, and I was slayed by the spirit of Paps/David Rocco.  I ran to my kitchen, pulled out the block of Willie’s 100% Supreme Cacao which boasted a single bean origin with notes of redcurrant and spice.   I ripped off the label, chopped up a third of the 180g block and looked heavenwards and asked, “What now?”

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Thankfully, I had taken mental notes after watching the programme on TV, and pulled out a couple of garlic cloves, chopped them up and threw them into a hot pan which was already heating up a drizzle of olive oil.  In the meantime, I chucked some penne into a pot of boiling water.   While the garlic spluttered in the frying pan, I twisted open a jar of anchovies and dumped the entire content into the pan, breaking the anchovies into tiny bits with my silicone spatula in fuchsia until they dissolved in the sizzling hot oil and garlic mixture.

The chocolate went into the pan next, and as it melted, the sauce turned a beautiful deep colour.   A handful of blitzed breadcrumbs went in next to thicken the sauce before I added the pot of drained penne into the saucepan.

Bald Eagle yelled from upstairs, “Is dinner ready yet? I’m starving!”  Images of his sprawled semi-naked body on the floor flashed before my eyes and I knew that a repeat performance was going to take place if I delayed any longer.   I should be so lucky.

As I stirred the pasta in the frying pan, it occurred to me that I had a plastic container full of Wagyu Prime Rib, a ta-pau of leftovers from a totally wagyu-ed out birthday dinner at Prime Le Meridien a couple of days earlier.  Waste not want not, deny the black hole the pleasure of wagyu.   I reheated the 250g portion, sliced it and threw it into the pasta.  Beautiful.

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As a final touch, as a tribute to my friend Paprika of ravenousrabbit.blogspot.com, I sprinkled a dash of smoked paprika into the pasta and stirred it in for that lovely spicy smokey flavour.  For presentation, some chopped Italian parsley did the trick.

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Our verdict: Amazing!   (Ya, really wan)  Other than the fact that my pasta was cooked perfectly al dente, the bitter and nutty flavour of the chocolate worked wonderfully with the salty anchovies, and the sauce adhered well to the pasta.   There is nothing sweet about a 100% chocolate block, so I am glad that I decided to toss in the leftover wagyu as it provided a natural sweetness to the dish.   I am so in love with this recipe! (and David Rocco…I love youuuu!)

Happy weekend, everyone, and be brave…try this recipe!  (For exact measurements of the original recipe, check out David Rocco’s website HERE.)