Ayam Masak Lemak Cili Api is deliciously rich and spicy. The yellow colour of the gravy comes from the addition of fresh turmeric. Chillies give this dish plenty of heat and flavour. Eat it with rice for a satisfying lunch.
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Debbie Teoh is one of Malaysia's greatest treasure and a good friend of mine. I can't really recall how we met a very very long time ago but I can still clearly remember her passion for Nyonya cooking. Her cooking is simply out of this world and several years ago, we shot
a few episodes of her cooking in our food studio sharing some of her favourite recipes including an ayam pongteh recipe.
It's hard to get honest refined Nyonya cooking outside the homes of a peranakan house but from 11th May for about 30 days only, you can try her cooking through a lavish buffet at Chatz Brasserie, Parkroyal. A steal at…
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by Alexa P., on Thu, May 10, 2012
Seafood
"34 ways to cook your crabs...."
If you're a fan of steaming hot fresh crabs this is one spot you'll want to try out. For starters they have 34 ways in which they prepare crab. When I think of the menu I somehow get Bubba's voice from Forrest Gump listing out the variety of crab dishes. You can have chill crab, salted egg crab, marmite crab, curry crab, cheese crab, clay pot crab....I'm sure you get the point.
I decided to order two of the most popular cooking styles; their signature butter crab and my personal favourite the kam heong crab. The butter crab is pretty famous here. It's cooked in a creamy and rich sauce giving a slight butteriness to the crab. This comes with mantou buns(steamed or fried) which you can dip into the sauce while enjoying the sweet flesh. This is quite heavy on its own so if you're in a small group I'd recommend just having this with the buns and maybe a veggie on the side.
To be honest though, the kam heong is what I come here for. Kam heong literally translates to "Golden Fragrant" from the Cantonese dialect. This dish has a mix of Chinese, Indian and Malay flavours as it uses a combination of dried shrimp, chilli, curry powder and curry leaves. This is extremely aromatic and tasty and will have you sucking on the shells and your fingers for more.
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Tom yam goong is a popular dish from Thailand. It's a sour and spicy soup made using exotic ingredients like kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass and fish sauce. Prawns are perfect for tom yam goong because they give it a nice sweet seafood flavour.
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The spices in this dish infuse the eggplant giving it an aromatic spicy flavour. It's almost like a thick vegetable curry but with the addition of 'kerisik'. Use pineapples for a slightly sweeter version. Eat this with biryani or a plate of warm rice.
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by The Charlie, on Fri, May 04, 2012
Mixed Cuisine
"nostalgic and tasty...."
There are a few restaurants that hold a special place in your heart. The ones you went on your first ever date, the ones you first sneaked out of school for, the ones that you saved up money to go to – because it was out of your price range enough to make it a special treat, but cheap enough to mean you could pay for it yourself as a broke schoolgirl. For me, Strawberry Fields is a place few other restaurants can hold a nostalgic candle up to (and the food’s pretty good too!)
What was that thing Anthony Bourdain said? If the menu has over 100 things on it, there’s no way it can be good? Something like that. While our favourite neighbourhood cafe isn’t exactly haute cuisine, it does a pretty excellent job at keeping the bellies of PJ folks full as it’s been doing for years. Looking pretty much the same since I first started going there as a pudgy schoolgirl more than 10 years ago, it occupies a sweet piece of real estate in New Town that many would clamour to hold on to for that long. In recent years, they’ve even acquired the lot across the walkway from it, essentially making the restaurant twice as big.
Back to the aforementioned menu: this thing really does have over 100 items on it. There’s a small selection of different nasi lemak, a couple of pages of Asian noodle and rice dishes, a whole section of Western offerings, snacks and nibbles, and a long list of drinks. I’ve rarely been disappointed with anything I order here, as their portions are generous and the taste almost always hits the spot. This has led to menu exploring; most times my friends and I come here, we challenge each other to try something new on the menu we haven’t tried before. You know, just to see if it’s good. And that’s what we did the other day, on our (probably) 256th visit to our favourite cafe. A few random jabs at the menu, and we sat back and waited patiently.
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When a friend enticed me with a Damansara Uptown nasi lemak crawl, I actually made the effort to brave the morning traffic to join her on this little excursion. The crawl consisted of kopitiams, a makeshift stall (and a car) scattered around Uptown. So loosen up your belts and join us on a gluttonous breakfast trail. You might end up yawning the whole…
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Who doesn't love mac and cheese? Golden crust on top and a cheesy creamy macaroni filling makes this the ultimate comfort food. Try it and see how quickly it disappears. When we made this in the FC kitchen, everyone was fighting for the last piece!
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Most Malaysians would have fond memories of eating this jelly at family gatherings and get-togethers. It's an easy recipe and perfect if you're looking for a dessert to make for a children's party.
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by Adly, on Thu, April 26, 2012
Indian
"Ask for the killer 'secret' sambal...."
Chanai & Chaya is one of the few places in the whole of Klang Valley where I will absolutely order their apoms. They make it plain and simple. Just in case you have not already known,
the TTDI market was scheduled to be demolished to make way for 'development' with no plans to relocate the sellers into a new place. It's such a shame that one of the best managed markets in Malaysia with the choicest ingredients had to go in this manner and we are all to blame if we don't do anything about this. Just in case we lose this market entirely, I wanted to record a piece of history before all this fades away.
So here's your apom guys! An indian apom is fermented rice flour cooked over a hot small wok. One expert batter pour later, the wok is covered with a small lid so that the heat from the steam cooks the thick middle layer but leaving it moist and juicy whilst the wok crisps the sides like a sweet cracker.
Aunty Padama makes this perfectly everytime. Her mom helps sometime when things get busy. Perfection on a plate. Apoms like this has a companion. Sweet coconut milk, slightly diluted so that it does not become too creamy. I like. It's such a simple dish with the simplest ingredients but every chef or cook that is worth their salt will attest that it's the simplest recipes that are the hardest to make well. C&C's version is light, slightly soury, no rice flour residue and comes with 27 years of experience.
Most people ferment the batter overnight but at C&C, they actually start batter fermentation at 4am. Perhaps they have a very good yeast catalyst or my best bet is that they put some of the previous day batter into the new one.
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Ayam paprik is a popular dish found frequently in tom yam shops across Malaysia. The addition of vegetables gives this a fresh twist and plenty of texture. Chilli paste is mixed with oyster sauce to give it a nice balance of spicy and salty flavours.
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This is a simple recipe that is a great way to use up leftover bread. Bread slices are layered in a lovely custard mixture and then baked. resulting in a gorgeous creamy dessert. Serve it with scoops of ice cream for the ultimate sweet treat!
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by Farah, on Wed, April 18, 2012
Seafood
"Prawns with yummy buttery floss...."
The star dish at Ewa is the steamed fish. All the ingredients are sourced locally and they only start cooking when they get your order so your dishes are freshly cooked on site in the open kitchen.The tilapia is steamed in a soy-based gravy, abundant with garlic, ginger and spring onions. The steaming process tenderizes the fish so the meat dissolves in your mouth effortlessly. They garnish the fish with minced garlic adding a sweet aromatic tone to the dish.
Flavours are subtle and it was quite satisfying but I can't help noticing the lack of vinegar. Chinese cooking wine is usually used to add some vinegary tones in the dish. Because this is a halal establishment, they had to omit the wine and the dish loses some of the sourish notes you associate with Chinese styled steamed fish. Even without the wine, this is a pretty decent dish so definitely give it a try if you get a chance to come here.
When I asked them why they use tilapia instead of the usual garoupa or tongsan, En. Kamarul who manages the restaurant with his brother explained the reason. " Not a lot of Malays like to eat tilapia because it's a freshwater fish and the taste could be quite bland. I wanted to change their perception. Actually, if you cook it the right way, the fish can absorb flavours easily. The flesh is soft and it's so popular overseas that it's a shame that we don't like to eat it more."
The next item we tried was the butter prawns. The plate was so full of buttery floss that you could hardly see the prawns! The prawns were fresh, sweet and succulently tasty. They were some slightly burnt bits of floss on the bottom of the plate, at first I was a bit miffed but as soon as I gave it a try my opinion changed. The burnt bits actually gave extra crunchiness to the dish. This is actually much sweeter than the ones I usually try at Chinese restaurants. No complaints though because the plate was emptied in no time at all!
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Sesame seeds give this chicken a wonderful nutty flavour and a great crunchy texture. This chicken is so finger-lickin' good that your family and friends will want you to make it all the time!
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by The Charlie, on Fri, April 13, 2012
Indian
"Biryani here is fieeerrcee..."
Fierce Curry House sits on a back street in Bangsar. Most people who would even know of this road are journalists who work in the newspaper offices nearby or people who have been driving in KL for a while. In actual fact, it’s literally a stone’s throw away from Jalan Bangsar – who knew a true culinary gem had been hiding there these past few months?
Herukh Jethwani, who used to work at Bangles (that old and fancy North Indian restaurant in town), now has his own place, a little shop his family took over from a chap fan place. The set-up is deceptively simple, as it looks just like any other mamak shop: foldable plastic chairs, buffet steam table, and open air, so the smell of curry and spices can reach the street and entice people in. And what you get when you go in, my friends, is one of the best Hyderabad biryanis in the Klang Valley.
Using almost 30 different spices (!), their biryanis are complex, exploding with flavour. Ingredients are assembled in little metal pots, sealed with plain capati dough and steamed for a few hours. Herukh points out that the dough helps keep the steam in, while providing an excellent marker as to when the contents in the pot are cooked: if the dough is cooked, then the biryani is cooked. Once it’s served to you, you then use your spoon or fork handle to pry off the dough and carefully open the top. Try, please, to not faint at the delicious scent of the steam.
We had the mutton biryani and the vegetarian biryani that day, as Fridays are their special biryani days, serving all four of their biryanis (the aforementioned along with chicken and fish). The mutton biryani was chock full of tender chunks of meat – these guys sure are generous! It’s also boneless, meaning that you don’t get that nasty surprise of chipping your tooth on a shard of bone as you do in a lot of other places. Flavour-wise it’s intense. There’s a hum of onions, the hit of herbs and spices, and the meat is actually sweet. This is because they get their meat delivered every day (their supplier is about 20 steps away from the shop) and everything is fresh, fresh, fresh.
What steals the show for us is their vegetarian biryani. As soon as we take a spoonful, our eyes go wide, sighs of delight take over the table and we silently shovel the rice and vegetables into our mouths. Carrots, cauliflowers, what looks like beans (at this point we don’t really care and trust Herukh with our lives), all mixed up in a mélange of equally complex but completely different combination of spices as the ones in the mutton biryani. The flavours in this one are a little more assertive, brighter, showing us that they don’t use a one-spice-mix-for-all approach. In fact, they’re so concerned about their biryanis that the biryani preparation gets its own kitchen!
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