Okay I admit, the title might be slightly misleading. These aren't straight up palak paneer sandwiches, rather they're palak-paneer-inspired sandwiches. There’s a distinction, as you’ll soon find out. 

Following on from my paneer-making weekend two weeks ago, I was thinking of things to have the cheese with. Having paneer on its own is good and all, don't get me wrong, but it was quickly getting boring. Naturally, with the amount of Indian food I've been subsisting on in KL (Ganga and Aunty Manju’s are my life), palak paneer immediately came to mind. This common North Indian dish literally translates to “spinach cheese”, but for those unacquainted with Indian cuisine, no it isn’t a weird, spinach-infused cheese (though that might actually be nice), it’s actually a dish of stewed, roughly pureed spinach, with little cubes of paneer cheese thrown into it. It’s robust, spice-laden, and all kinds of comforting, kinda like being hugged by an Indian aunty. 

Along with that dreamy thought of palak paneer, a separate but equally attractive proposition came to my mind as well – halloumi sandwiches, but instead of halloumi, paneer. Without skipping a beat, my mind somehow combined the two thoughts, and that's how I ended up with this weird mash-up of palak paneer sandwiches.

I envisioned having the paneer seared like you would halloumi in a halloumi sandwich, and the ‘palak’ would be worked into a pesto spread. (Because in my head, cheese + pesto just clicked.) Topped off with a bit of caramelised onions, tomatoes, arugula, and some quality sourdough toast, and I got myself a sandwich worthy of sandwich Saturdays, a.k.a. my newly-coined 'sarniedays' (said with a thick Southern drawl, it could almost sound like Saturday).

The star here though, I think, is the pesto. It's glorious and chunky in all the ways a good pesto should be, with the sweetness of the palak (spinach) mellowing out the stronger basil flavour. Adding a bit of garam masala to it definitely amped up the Indian notes in it too. Side note: In hindsight, I should’ve added some paneer INTO to pesto. Since pesto usually have cheese in it, paneer would've been a great substitution in lieu of the traditional parmesan, making it that bit more Indian! (D’oh!) Ah well, maybe next time!

Regardless, even without the paneer, it's still a really solid pesto recipe. Though I definitely think the addition of paneer would've given it a whole other, creamier dimension. I’d validate this myself, but wouldn’t it be more fun if you tried it and let me know? 😉

- - -

Palak (Paneer) Pesto

makes ~250g of pesto, enough for 4-6 portions of pasta, or 10 sandwiches

Ingredients

50g spinach
20g basil, leaves only, thai basil works too! 
50g walnuts
4 garlic cloves
½ a lemon, zested and juiced
1 teaspoon (5g) salt
½ teaspoon (3g) garam masala
¼ teaspoon (2g) ground black pepper
100ml olive oil
30g firm paneer cheese, optional (I didn’t add it in but I imagine it’d be a great addition! Here's how to make it at home.)

Directions

1. In a blender, add everything but the oil. So there's the spinach, basil leaves, walnuts, garlic, lemon zest and juice, salt, garam masala, and pepper. Add the paneer cheese at this point too if you’re using it. (You should!)
2. Pulse everything together in the blender, slowly drizzling in the olive oil as you blend to help the pesto come together. Depending on your desired consistency, be careful with how long you blend the pesto for. I like mine on the chunkier side as opposed to silky smooth, which took all but 20 seconds of blending on medium-low speed. Of course, this also depends on your blender itself. (I used a Vitamix, which can blend like there's no tomorrow, but any ol' blender would do the job for a rough pesto.)

I know talking politics is far from my realm of comfort, but with this new change of government, there’s been a palpable sense of possibility and belief in the Malaysian air (alongside the usual haze). So if I believe it enough, perhaps you’ll see that this silly food writer can weigh in on serious political matters too (or at least attempt to)!

On a bigger note, the real reason why I’m bringing up this bit of politics is to, in my own way, somewhat immortalise this landmark moment of Malaysia’s history. Like most Malaysians of my generation, we know that what happened in the past month will be the story of our country we tell our children and grandchildren in the decades to come. So kids (and my non-Malaysian reader), here’s a quick glimpse of what just happened to Malaysia.

Since Malaysia’s independence from British colonial rule 61 years ago, we’ve only ever been governed by one ruling party. A corrupt, race-baiting, self-aggrandising party at that. Sure, they weren’t always bad. But like an avocado left out to ripen for too long, this party’s long rule over Malaysia blackened and soured their governing approach from the inside out.

So in the recent election, with our corrupt, now ex-prime minister (the 7th) at the height of his abusive power, the people of Malaysia finally fought back. In the face of massive gerrymandering and vote-buying, we fought for hope and honesty, and voted out the only government we’ve ever known. Not only that (and this is what I’m most proud of), we did it in the most peaceful, democratic way possible, with no riots, no needless violence, no mess. Now, with our new prime minister, Dr. Mahathir, at the helm of the country, Malaysia’s future is looking bright yet again!

Now obviously things are a lot more complicated than I just made it seem. For one, Mahathir used to be our previous (4th) prime minister, and previously led the exact same party he just ousted this election. During his previous term in office, he made some dodgy decisions, imposing media sanctions, siding with one race over others in several instances, and unfairly imprisoning his then-deputy (who is now slated to be our next prime minister). All in all, he was said to have ruled like a dictator, However, he did undoubtedly lead and develop Malaysia to great heights, so in many ways he is also somewhat of a capable candidate to lead the country, perhaps one that we need right now.

Leadership matters aside, so much of the country seemed to have already been laid to waste by the previous government, it’ll be a tall task to bring the country back to its feet, especially on the finance front. (We're apparently >RM1 trillion in debt, no thanks to Najib (our previous PM) & Co..) Not only that, I feel like corruption is so embedded in our society that it’ll be tough to even begin tackling it. As for the biggest scandal in Malaysian history - 1MDB (heck, it might even be the biggest in world history), it still seems unlikely that its perpetrators will truly be brought to justice.

While these are all legitimate worries, for now at least, the whole country seems to be buzzing on a high, and it feels like we can achieve anything we set our minds to. So y’know Malaysia, I'm fricking excited to see you grow! 😊

Before I get too out of my depth here, I’ll stop with the political talk and get back to the one thing I know best – food. And in this case, paneer. But if you’re interested in more Malaysian politics, I’ve included some links to some articles about it at the end of the post, written by people who have actual political credibility (unlike me).

So anyway, in between digesting the glut of breaking news (and election memes) over the post-election weekend, I made paneer! It’s a simple, 3-ingredient cheese that takes all but 30 minutes of active time to whip up, so if you’re lazy, cash-strapped, and cheese-hungry, this is the cheese to make.

Now I wish I had a more compelling reason for making paneer, one that can somehow be elegantly linked to politics, but really I just made it for kicks. Actually scratch that, forget what I just said. Since we're talking politics, I should do what politicians do best – spin stories and create tentative links where none exist!

So the actual reason why I made paneer was to celebrate Mahathir, our new prime minister, who is also adoringly known as Che Det. And since it was our 14th general election, and 4-1=3, take the first three letters of Mahathir’s nickname and you get ‘CHE’. Now what food also starts with the letters ‘che’? CHEESE, that’s what.

Plus, in this election, the (now ex-)ruling party indulged in a whole lot of race baiting. Again, with it being our 14th election, and 4-1=3, this begs the question – what’s the 3rd largest race in Malaysia? INDIANS, that’s who.

And what is a cheese that is also Indian? PANEER!

So there’s you have it, the real reason I made paneer!

- - -

Further reading:

1. What Just Happened in Malaysia?
2. At Last, Tyranny Has Ended in Malaysia
3. Frozen In Fear, Then I Cried: How Malaysians Felt When Barisan Nasional Fell
4. Understanding Malaysia's Political Earthquake
5. 1MDB: The Inside Story of The World's Biggest Financial Scandal

- - -

Home-made Paneer

Makes ~200g of cheese

Ingredients

1 litre fresh milk, full fat, never use UHT
30g lemon juice, 1 lemon should be more than sufficient
2 teaspoons (~8g) salt

Directions

1. Pour the milk and salt into a saucepan and heat it until about 90°C, stirring occasionally to prevent any milk solids from scorching on the bottom of the pan. The milk will start to get frothy as it comes to temperature. (Don’t fret if you accidentally overheat it until it boils, just take it off the heat and let it cool slightly.)
2. Take the milk off the heat and pour in the lemon juice. Give the milk a quick stir, then remove your spatula or stirring apparatus and let it sit for 5-10 minutes. In this time, the milk will start to curdle. The solid curds will begin to separate from the liquid whey. It’s the curds that we’ll be using to make cheese, and fattier milk will make more curds, which is why it’s always better to use full fat milk over skimmed milk, which would lessen the yield.
3. Ready a sieve or chinois that’s lined with muslin/cheesecloth, and gently scoop the milk curds into the strainer. Towards the end, you can pour all the whey through the cheesecloth to filter out all the milk solids. As for the whey that’s collected through the cheesecloth, far from being a useless byproduct, you can use it to make lacto-ferments or smoothies!
4. Once you have the all the curds, wrap up the cheesecloth and give it a gently squeeze to press out the excess whey. Then, transfer the cheesecloth with the curds onto a flat container or a plate and shape it however you want. (A square, circle, triangle, octagon, dodecahedron; whatever tickles your fancy really.) Fold the cheesecloth over the curds so it’s covered on both sides, and weigh it down with a heavy pot or plate with a flat base. Leave it pressed for 30 minutes to an hour, until it becomes a little firmer and pick-up-able.
5. You can use it fresh immediately. But I like to refrigerate it for a day or two, uncovered, to further firm it up.

Having grown up in Malaysia, Malaysian culture is the one that I'm undoubtedly the most familiar with. As a food writer though, I have a perpetual itch for exploring other cultures that I know little about, all in the pursuit of weird and interesting flavours and dishes. Perhaps I've overextended at times, butchering babka recipes and making silly Japanese-inspired dishes. Call it cultural misappropriation if you want to, but these are exactly the kind of unbridled explorations that to me, makes food and cooking so endlessly interesting! So I'm not about to stop anytime soon. 

What I find especially engaging though, more than exploring any single culture, is when two (or more) cultures collide and come together in unexpected ways, whether it’s through random acts of kindness or civilised diplomacy (sadly a seemingly rare occurrence in our world today), interracial babies (they are the cutest), or best of all, through cross-cultural foods.

So in yet another instance of a boundary-breaking, possibly heretical dish, may I present to you my French-Korean food baby - black garlic financiers!

Black garlic is admittedly a recent fad food. In the past decade, it has gone from relative obscurity to appearing in highfalutin restaurant menus in the form of fancy purees and foams, all to way to really simple, home-cook-friendly dishes like Posie Harwood's chocolate chip cookies.

Black garlic in itself is a wacky ingredient. It’s funky in all the ways fermented foods are, but it doesn’t actually undergo any fermentation at all. To make it, it is kept at a steady temperature (60°C) in a humid environment for 2-3 weeks (sometimes up to a month), allowing it to turn from pale garlicky yellow to clay brown, to an elegant shade of ebony. The change in colour is due to the Maillard reaction, which is when amino acids react with sugars to give certain foods a browned, complex taste. (Think roasted coffee beans and seared steaks.) In blackening garlic, the pungent raw garlic flavour gives way to a deep, earthy flavour that is reminiscent of balsamic vinegar and caramelised onions, only funkier. 

Though the exact origin of black garlic remains uncertain, the two main origin stories point to Korea. The first details a British farmer who, wanting to preserve his 900,000 bulbs of garlic harvest, chanced upon a 4000-year-old Korean method for curing garlic. The other is propagated by Korean inventor Scott Kim, who claimed to have himself developed the product in 2004. He then went on to set up Black Garlic Inc., which was at one point the largest producer of black garlic in the US. 

These theorised origins are further supported by the black garlic industry in Korea, which has seen increased production of pots and gadgets specifically designed for making black garlic. But if parting with a few hundred dollars for what is essentially a heated pot isn't your thing, for plebs like me, there's also a Korean method of making black garlic using a rice cooker or dehydrator (though your electricity bill will likely see a spike, as you'll need to leave your rice cooker / dehydrator on for a couple of weeks). If you're still keen on making your own black garlic at home though, try this recipe from Shinshine! I've personally never made black garlic myself, but was fortunate enough to get some from my neighbour. (Thanks Auntie Anita!)

Now as much as I love Asian ingredients, I'm next to hopeless at cooking up truly authentic Asian dishes. But since I'm technically trained in French cooking, I thought to marry the flavour of black garlic with a classy French pastry I learnt to make in culinary school - financiers! They’re super moist, almond-y cakes that I’ve had the pleasure of fattening up myself on when I lived in Paris two years ago.

The combination of black garlic and buttery, nutty financiers worked really well together, but it was less of an inspired pairing on my part, but more of the fact that financiers are extremely accommodating of any flavours. I based my recipe off David Lebowitz's brown butter financiers (a solid recipe on its own), but tweaked it very slightly to get it to the right texture and consistency to work alongside the black garlic. In fact, I daresay the financier recipe below is versatile enough to work with any flavour thrown at it. I made some with jackfruit and lime as a test and they turned out real nice! Though I'm clearly partial to my cross-cultural financiers, black garlic or not, they are pretty 👌👌👌. 

So go make sum.

(Still terrible at closing articles.)

- - -

Black Garlic Financiers

Makes 15

Ingredients

120g butter, plus ~30g more for butter-ing moulds
210g almond meal
70g flour
250g caster sugar
½ teaspoon (2g) salt
6 egg whites
½ teaspoon (3g) vanilla extract
30g black garlic, finely chopped, this can be substituted for any other flavours

Directions

1. Soften the 30g of butter by bringing it to room temperature, and brush it onto your financier moulds. Cupcake/muffin moulds work fine too. (This was what I used.)
2. Add the rest of the butter into a pan and heat over medium until it turns brown and starts to smell nutty. You’ll probably get a few dark specks in your brown butter (these are the over-caramelised milk solids stuck to the bottom of the pan). You can leave them in, but if you’d rather get rid of them, strain it through a cheesecloth or a kitchen towel. After straining, let your brown butter cool until warm to touch.
3. As your brown butter cools, weigh out your almond meal, flour, caster sugar and salt and put them together in a mixing bowl. Add the egg whites and vanilla extract to this and stir until a smooth batter forms. To this, add the brown butter. Finally, add the black garlic (or any other flavours you might be using).
4. Fill the buttered moulds with the financier batter until it reaches three-quarters of the way up the sides, and bake them in an oven preheated to 180°C for 15-20 minutes, until the tops are nicely browned. Remove from the oven and let them cool slightly before releasing them from the mould.
5. The financiers keep well for 5 days, possibly up to a week in an airtight container.

Okay that might've conjured some sort of disturbing image in your head. Perhaps one of a soggy, featherless chicken covered in thick, translucent slime, a scene that probably belongs more in an Alien movie rather than on a food blog. But then again, I like my weird foods so maybe this isn't too out of place...

But before you think I'm a right weirdo, saliva chicken is the name for an actual, real-life dish. The name is a literal translation of its Chinese name, 口水鸡. Though it might seem like a downright awful name, just thinking about this dish causes me to salivate profusely, so in a strange way I suppose the name is apt. 

The dish itself is native to the Sichuan region of China, and consists of two main elements - cold cuts of chicken, drenched in a spicy, numbing Sichuan chilli oil-sauce. I know this doesn't sound entirely appealing yet, but bear with me, I'll warm you up to it!

First, let's address the chicken. Serving chicken cold might be a real weird concept to the Western world (unlike the idiomatic cold turkey), but like all things in cooking, there’s a reason for this. We typically envisage chicken served warm/hot as having two textures - crispy/fatty skin and juicy meat. For this Sichuan chicken dish though, right after its cooked through in a pot of water/broth, it's immediately plunged into a freezing ice bath. This process tightens up the skin and causes the fat underneath to get all gooey and gelatinous, creating a third textural element. So you get three very complementary textures in a simple piece of chicken - taut, snappy skin, a gelatinous fat layer, and super succulent meat! 

More remarkable than the chicken itself though, is the sauce. Now I’m not the biggest fan of spicy foods, nor can I tolerate it much (embarrassing to admit as a Malaysian, I know), but the key spice in this sauce is a sure cause for addiction. To me, it's the craziest, most mind-blowing spice of all - Sichuan peppercorns.

Most peppers have some sort of spicy kick to it, whether it's peppercorns or chilli peppers like chipotle, bird's eye chilli, or the Carolina Reaper *heavy breathing*. The worst peppers take you through a series of hellish trails that goes something like this: tongue-tickling spicy --> head-scratchy spicy --> need-cold-milk spicy --> help-me-I'm-crying spicy --> I-can't-feel-my-face spicy. 

The Sichuan pepper though, fast-tracks you to the final level in one fell swoop, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of being typically fire-burning spicy, they're all about the tingly, tongue-numbing sensation of a level 5 spiciness, but with almost none of the heat. It sounds real weird, but as someone who can't handle much heat, I'm demonically addicted to these peppers.

Here's a science-y segue! For the chemistry nerds out there (myself included), the compound that causes this numbing sensation is hydroxy-α-sanshool. It’s said to excite certain ultra-sensitive touch receptors in our mouths, causing a mechanical reaction (as opposed to a chemical one), which explains why we feel a tingling, pins-and-needles sorta feeling after eating any ma-la (麻辣; literally numbing-spicy) food. Interesting, no? 🤓

In some ways then, the numbing buzz you get from Sichuan pepper is comparable to the buzz you'd get from alcohol or drugs. Well, a really tame, class-D drug at that, for real tame people like me who prefer a quiet night in with a good book over a wild, bumpin night out. (Just let me indulging in my pretend-drug-taking bad-assery k.) 

So for a perfectly legal drug hit, order saliva chicken the next time you're at a Sichuanese restaurant. Or better yet, make you own at home, where you can tweak the level of numbing-spiciness to your liking. Personally, I like mine extra numbing, but with minimal heat. (The recipe below reflects this.) To get your hand on some quality Sichuan peppercorns, try your local specialty spice store as supermarkets/grocers don't usually stock them. For those in Malaysia though, if you can't get them, let me know as I recently received a large pack all the way from Taiwan! (Thanks Asya!) I'm just the dealer though yeah, and I'm not liable for your inevitable addiction... 😉

Saliva Chicken (口水鸡)

serves 4-6

Ingredients

Chicken
1 tablespoon salt
1-inch piece of ginger, crushed
2 scallion stems, crushed
2 cloves of garlic, crushed

Marinade
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons Shaoxing wine
1 tablespoon sesame oil

Sichuan Chilli Sauce
3 dried chillies
2 tablespoons chilli flakes
2 tablespoons Sichuan peppercorns
1 star anise
1 bay leaf
½ teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon five spice powder
1 tablespoon sesame seed, roasted
110g neutral oil
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
3 tablespoons black vinegar, or rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons Shaoxing wine
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
4 cloves of garlic, finely minced

Garnishes
2 scallions, chopped
1 bunch cilantro, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon sesame seeds, toasted

Directions

1. In a large pot, add the whole chicken, salt, crushed ginger, garlic, and scallions. Add water to the pot until the chicken is completely submerged. Bring this to a boil, then turn it down and leave it to simmer, covered, for 15-20 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, prepare an ice bath in a separate deep pot. When the chicken is cooked, immediately transfer it to the ice bath to chill it down quickly. This helps the chicken skin tighten and you’ll get that jellied fat under the skin.
3. To make the marinade, reduce (boil off) the chicken poaching liquid until halved. Then, take two cups of this liquid and to this add the light soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, and sesame oil. Let the marinade cool down to room temperature, and pour onto a deep tray or container. In the same container, place the chicken breast-side down. Cover with whole container with plastic wrap, and leave in the fridge to marinate for 2-3 days. After the first day, flip the chicken over to get the chicken evenly marinated.
4. For the chilli oil, first, toast the dried chillies, chilli flakes, Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, bay leaf, cumin, five spice powder, and sesame seed in a pan. You’ll know when it’s done when the spices start to become really fragrant, and the pan starts to smoke just a little. Put the oil in a separate saucepan and heat it up to roughly 80°C. Then, dump all the spices into the oil. (Make sure your oil isn’t too hot! If the spices start to bubble and pop in the oil, you’ve gone overboard and it’ll likely burn.) Let the oil cool down to room temperature, then blend it in a blender until the spices are all pulverised. To the spiced oil, add the light soy sauce, vinegar, Shaoxing wine, sesame oil, sugar, and minced garlic, and you’ve got a spanking, spicy sichuan chilli sauce! The sauce can last for 2-3 days, up to a week (maybe two!) if you don’t add the garlic in.
5. On D-day, carve up the chicken (here’s a useful guide), drizzle on the sichuan chilli sauce, and garnish liberally with chopped scallions, cilantro, and sesame seeds. And boom, you've got yourself a Walter-White-worthy meal. 

Did you know you could make your own salt crystals at home, at a fraction of the price of those expensive, fancy sea salt flakes!? I didn't!

But after stumbling upon some salt-making videos, and on a separate occasion, this ChefSteps recipe, I wanted to try making my own salt at home. By of course, I wasn't just happy with making regular salt, so I tainted them with some beetroot juice to make faux-pink salt, which turned out pretty well! Sure, it's doesn't have the purported health benefits of actual Himalayan pink salt, nor the provenence of famous sea salts like Maldon or Guerande, but in terms of aesthetics, this can rival any fancy finishing salts, and is also much less of a burden on your wallet! 

Plus, since it has been awhile since we talked about anything science-y on this blog, this proved to be an opportune moment to indulge my inner geek (and yours too) with some good-old science! 🤓

Where does salt come form?

The salt we consume comes from two main sources – seawater, and salt deposits in the earth, left behind by ancient seas and lakes that have dried up. As a kid, if you’ve ever had an accidental gulp of seawater from swimming in the sea, you’ll remember that it tastes preeety salty. In reality though, the concentration of salt in seawater is on average just 3.5%, meaning for every 100 mL of seawater, there’s actually only 3.5 grams of salt in it. Just goes to show how potent salt is, eh!

To extract this 3.5% of salt, seawater is traditionally pumped into large ponds and left to dry out under the sun. There are still many places that processes salt in this manner, like around the Dead Sea in Israel and Jordan, and in Guerande where fleur de sel de Guerande comes from. But in places where this wouldn’t be feasible (mostly due to frigid temperatures and/or frequent rainfall), salt is often obtained through more industrial means, where salt water is first boiled vigorously, then the salt is forcefully crytallised out of the water, then centrifuged to dry it out. The whole process takes just a few hours. 

Regular cheapo salt vs. expensive salt flakes

If you remember from your secondary/middle school chemistry classes, the chemical formula for salt is sodium chloride (NaCl). This chemical composition allows it to form a lattice structure. So if you put regular fine table salt under a microscope, you should be able to see that the little salt crystals are in fact near-perfect little cubes. These are usually very pure salt manufactured under highly-controlled factory environments.

On the flipside, I’m sure we've all encountered those expensvie salt flakes that comes in different shapes and sizes. From ones that look like little Egyptian pyramids (characteristic of Maldon salt), to snowflake-like dendrictic salt, to little Machu Picchu lookalikes, salt flakes can take on vastly different structures. The shape of the salt crystals depends on several factors - the evaporation rate, the processing method, the composition of the trace amount of minerals found in it etc. etc.. At Jacobsen Salt Co. in the US, for instance, seawater is collected and boiled slightly to increase its salinity and remove impurities, and then fed into large open vats to slowly evaporate over 3-4 days. In this case, the salt is left to naturally form on top of the water, allowing them to coalesce into larger, pyramidal flakes, as opposed to the rapidly formed, tiny, cubical table salt.

Pink salt?

Aside from the usual sodium and chlorine atoms that we know as table salt, there are other minerals and elements that often exist together with these Na and Cl atoms. In Himalayan pink salt (which technically isn't from the Himalayas), there's a decent amount (roughly 2%) of foreign minerals like calcium, magnesium, and potassium in it, which gives the salt its characteristic pink hue. Depending on the mineral content, salt can also take on different colours. In black salt / kala namak for instance, the trace amounts of iron sulphide and other minerals gives it a reddish-brown hue, and in Icelandic lava salt, minerals in the lava cause the salt to be jet-black. 

Salt manufacturers have also been known to manually infuse their salt with different flavours/colours. Jacobsen Salt Co. for example has dozens of different flavoured salt. From smoke salt, garlic salt, to even pinot noir salt! 

---

Taking a cue from Jacobsen Salt Co., I thought it'd be pretty cool to make some infused salt flakes at home. All you really need is salt, water, a good dose of patience and a whole lotta love, and you can end up with your very own fancy-schmancy finishing salts!

The premise is simple. First, we start off with dissolving some cheapo salt in water to make a really saturated brine. The infusion can be added at this point. (I used beetroot juice for my "pink salt", but you can try using anything from garlic or chilli paste, to charcoal powder, maybe even wine!) Then, the saline solution is placed in a wide tray/pan in the oven and left to evaporate for several hours. As the water evaporates and the salinity of the brine increases, salt crystals will form on the surface of the water, which with time, will form a raft and then sink down to the bottom of the tray. All that's left to do then is to gently scoop up these beautiful salt flakes and let them dry out to get your own homemade salt!

You can use your home-made flecks of salt to top anything really. Elevate your weekday salads, pastas, soups or tartines with a good salt-bae pinch of your salt flakes. Or if you’re secretly basic like me, make some Instagram-worthy avo toast. 🕺

---

Beetroot Salt

Makes ~80g of beetroot salt

Ingredients

1 small beetroot, or 100ml of beetroot juice
400ml water
100g salt, fine, coarse or kosher all works!
 

Directions

1. If using raw beetroot, peel and cut up the beetroot into small pieces, then blend in a blender or food processor with 100ml of water. Strain out and save the liquid. Alternatively, use a juicer to obtain the beetroot juice.
2. In a small saucepan, add the rest of the water, salt, and beetroot juice. Heat this up and stir until all the salt is dissolved. If there’s a bit of salt that’s still not dissolved, add a bit more water and stir until the salt dissolves. Transfer this to a wide, oven safe pan. (Glass or ceramic works best; Try not to use aluminium / stainless steel trays, as the saline solution may react and discolour the metal.)
3. Place the tray of salty beetroot liquid in an oven or dehydrator set at 70°C, and leave it to evaporate for 4 hours or longer, up to overnight.
4. By the 2-hour mark, you should see bits of salt crystals forming on the water near the sides of the tray. This will continue to propagate with time. Wait till the whole surface of the water is entirely covered with the salt crystals, then using a fork or a small sieve, gently lift out the salt crystals, and place into a separate fine-mesh sieve. Transfer these salt crystals into a separate bowl or tray and put in the oven to thoroughly dry it out.
5. Repeat step 4 in 2-to-3-hour intervals twice more, until barely any liquid is left in the tray.
6. At this point, you might have some rough clumps of salt that have sunk to the bottom of the tray. If you want to get the most yield out of this recipe, you can dissolve this salt in more water and beetroot juice, and repeat steps 3-5 to get another batch of salt (though this batch will probably not crystallise as nicely as the first batch).
7. Salt bae away!

You might know of a Japanese donburi / rice bowl dish called bara chirashi don. It's essentially steamed sushi rice topped with a generous heap of raw fish, sometimes avocado, ikura and cucumber, all cut into little half-inch cubes. As you might've guessed from the photos, I took the concept and aesthetics of this dish and flipped it on its head, turning it into a weird, breakfast-fruit-bowl-sorta situation. 

I know what you're thinking, a bunch of fruit cubes doesn't make a donburi (rice bowl) though. But ah-ha, this is where I had a rare stroke of genius (if I may say so myself), because under all those fruits... there's rice pudding! 

Okay this might seem a little ridiculous and forced (and in a sense it is), but I was just having a little fun and getting all weird and creative in the kitchen. And I must say, I'm quite proud for having come up with this silly little idea. So judge all you want, but I think this bara chirashi fruit bowl is weird and wonderful in its own right. HAHA.

As much as the aesthetics of this dish amuses me though, we all know it's the flavour of the dish that matters most. And I'm proud to say, my weird creation tastes pretty darn good too! This is coming from a guy who, after years of gloopy British-boarding-school cafeteria dinners, almost abhors rice puddings. Granted, I did make my rice pudding a little unconventional by using sushi (calrose) rice, and incorporating a really rich brown butter vanilla caramel into it. I admit its a little heavy on its own, but the fruit manages to cut straight through the richness, making the dish quite nicely balanced. Hmm, I think I might've found the antithesis of the bland, cafeteria gloop that first turned me off rice pudding!

Now I gotta admit, the idea for this dish did initially sound as ridiculous to me as it is to you, but this worked out surprisingly well in the end! Now I'm not claiming to be a genius chef or have created a real special dish here. (Pfft, chefs would probably laugh at my silly chirashi fruit bowl.) All I set out to do every time I'm in the kitchen, which I encourage you to do as well, is to have fun and play around with food and ingredients, while treating them with the love and respect they deserve. And hopefully with a bit of luck, we're able to come up with some interesting, funky, tasty dishes, and learn a thing or two along the way.

- - -

Hmm, seems like my blog has taken a random turn lately. I’ve been making a lot of weird, cross-cultural dishes that are hard to categorise into a particular cuisine / style. It’s very different from my previous articles about traditional Malaysian-Chinese dishes, and I’d really like to know if you find these weird, unbridled explorations interesting at all. Because as much as I hope my writing and weird food experiments can help you a more adventurous cook and eater, you might very well find this a pointless waste of time, if not a little silly and facepalm-worthy at times.

So let me know down below, so I can be a better cook and writer for ya! All criticisms and comments are welcome! 😊

- - -

Bara Chirashi (Fruit) Don (a.k.a. Fruits

makes 5-6 servings

Ingredients

Brown Butter Caramel Rice Pudding, adapted from Merrill Stubbs’s Caramel Rice Pudding recipe
50g butter
90g sugar
1 pinch (~3g) salt
800ml milk
200ml cream, can be substitute for milk
50ml coconut milk, optional
½ tsp vanilla extract, or 1 vanilla pod
150g sushi rice, I used calrose

Toppings
a few dollops (~100g) of yogurt
3 kiwis
1 large mango
1 red dragonfruit
1 white dragonfruit
plus any other fruit you’d like, really; pomegranates, pineapples, bananas, oranges would all work well!
 

Directions

1. Melt and brown the butter in a deep saucepan or pot over medium heat. Once little specks of brown start to appear at the bottom of the pan and the butter starts to colour and smell real nutty, add in the sugar and salt, turn the heat down to low. Stir until the sugar dissolves, careful not to let the sugar burn. This should take 2-3 minutes.
2. Once all the sugar has melted and you get a nice brown caramel (though it might look slightly split at this point), add in roughly 50ml of milk. The caramel will hiss and steam, but what’s important here is to keep whisking and stirring it so the caramel doesn’t seize and solidify into chunks. Once you get a nice smooth paste, add in more milk a bit at a time, whisking as you go. Once all the milk has been added, add in the cream, coconut milk, and vanilla extract.
3. Give the sushi rice a quick rinse to remove the excess starch, and add it to the milk mixture. Turn up the heat, and once the mixture comes to a boil, turn it down to a simmer. Cook uncovered for 30-35 minutes, until the rice is cooked through but not mushy. Make sure to stir it every 5 minutes or so, just to make sure the rice doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
4. Once the rice is cooked through, remove the pan from the heat. It might look a bit watery at this point, but don’t worry, it’ll thicken up as it cools down. When it’s sufficiently cool, transfer to a container and keep in the refrigerator until needed. The rice pudding is best eaten cold.
5. Cut the fruits up into bite-sized chunks. (They really don't have to be cubes, the only reason I did it was to give it that bara chirashi look. :P)
6. To serve, place a few spoonfuls of rice pudding into the bottom of your bowl. Top it with some yogurt, then pile on your (perfect cubes of) fruits!

Guess what, I’m finally living up to my blog name, because... I made alcohol!

Granted, it’s neither gin nor cocktail (as the blog name riffed off), but a mild, pleasantly sweet pineapple beer, based off & inspired by Mexican tepache. Now there's three things you should probably know about me 

1. I don't actually like the taste of beer
2. I'm terrible at following rules and nomenclature, so calling this 'beer' might be incorrect. Though it does look and taste like beer, and
3. Like many Asians, I'm terrible at handling my alcohol. (Two glasses of wine can get me lobster-red; Ugh, silly Asian flush.)

So you might be wondering - what inclined me to make this pineapple beer in the first place!?

The answer? Brad Leone.

Words can't describe how much of a fan I am of this goofy man-child. His fermentation series on YouTube is food entertainment at its best, and his laid-back approach to food and cooking (and the addition of lotsa silly, low-budget graphics) strangely makes his videos all the more endearing. Plus, I'm a sucker for anything to do with food, education and entertainment, so I was hooked from episode one (that kombucha spill though, classic Brad).

So okay, back to alcohol. There's a video in Brad's series where he makes tepache. Not only did it involve some very funky, active bacterial fermentation (a topic I'm very prone to geeking out to), he also made the whole process look so simple and gratifying to make - mash up some pineapples, spices, and sugar water, put it aside for a few days, strain, bottle it, and you got pineapple beer! I was sold. 

For my take on tepache, I followed his recipe 80% of the way, making one crucial change. A traditional Mexican tepache commonly uses piloncillo as a sweetener. It's a deep, dark, cane sugar that has all kinds of caramel and honeyed notes. Brad's recipe replaced this with turbinado/brown sugar, presumably because piloncillo is hard to come by in the US. In Malaysia, piloncillo is next to impossible to find, but there’s a similar (and dare I say superior) alternative – gula melaka! (All the Malaysians reading this probably saw this coming, but hey I am a very basic Malaysian bij okay.) If you've seen my recipes, you’ll know that I LOVE working gula melaka into everything. (See here and here and here for proof.) But if you've never heard of gula melaka, it’s a dark, unrefined coconut palm sugar which is all kinds of fragrant and complex and wonderful; The nectar of the Malaysian dessert gods, essentially.

So I added gula melaka into my pineapple beer, and I have to say, it turned out really well! Though the flavour of gula melaka didn't really come through (makes sense because all the sugars would have been converted to alcohol & CO2 by the bacteria), I'd like to think it had something to do with the success of my first-ever homebrew. If you're not a fan of gula melaka though (sorry but we cannot be friends), regular brown sugar would work fine too.

As with many fermented foods, tepache can be very temperamental. Depending on where you live, the temperature and humidity of your surroundings, how much sunlight you get, even how much you breathe on it (because as icky as it is to hear, there's bacteria in your breath), your tepache will end up tasting very different, even if you used the same recipe. 

After the success of my first batch, I made tepache once more, keeping the overall recipe the same, with the only change being the type of pineapple I used. In the first batch, I used a Josephine pineapple, and for the second, I got a generic, unnamed one from a dodgy fruit stall near my house. And guess what, they turned out wildly different! The sweeter, juicier Josephine pineapple made a super fizzy, fruity, pale-ale-like tepache, and the mystery pineapple made a tannic, disappointingly flat tepache, more like IPA if you were to make a beer comparison, but without much fizz and fun. 

I much prefer the first one I made, but y'know, we all have different palates and taste preferences, so you might very well prefer the tannic tepache! Unfortunately when it comes to fermentation however, it's hard to get a surefire recipe that works every time, anywhere in the world, due to the variables mentioned above. So the only way to end up with a tepache you like is to engage in some good ol' trial and error, tuning the recipe to your specific environment. You can start off with the recipe below, but more importantly, try experimenting with the variables to make a tepache you really like! (Change up the fermentation length and temperature, use different pineapple varieties, add some chilies or spieces etc..) Don't be discouraged if you don't initially get what you're looking for though. After all, it's the testing and learning from mistakes that makes cooking (fermentation especially) truly fulfilling. So experiment away, young padawan. Chin-chin! 🍻

- - -

Pineapple Beer (a.k.a. Tepache)

makes a little more than 2 litres of tepache, roughly equal to 4 UK pints

Ingredients

1 medium/large pineapple, de-skinned, cut into 1-inch (2-3cm) chunks (you can leave the eyes on)
200g light brown sugar
200g gula melaka (coconut palm sugar), can be substituted with any brown sugar (dark or light)
1 thumb-sized knob of ginger
1 cinnamon stick
3 cloves
2 litres of water (‘wourder’ if you’re Brad), possibly more

Directions

1. Place the gula melaka, brown sugar, and about 500ml (roughly 2 cups) of water in a small pot, and heat to dissolve the sugar.
2. Then, in a large jar or container, combine the pineapple, sugar syrup, cinnamon, and cloves. Mash up the pineapples using a potato masher or a kraut pounder (or any other blunt kitchen instrument you can find, really). Then add the rest of the water into the jar. Make sure the pineapples are fully submerged; Add more water if they're not. Give it a quick stir, then cover tightly. Set aside in a cool, dark place for 2-4 days. (20-25°C would be ideal.) When done, it should be a little fizzy, and smells slightly floral and yeasty. Taste it, and if it isn’t funky or fizzy enough, let it ferment for another day or two.
3. Once done, strain the mixture through a cheesecloth, or an extremely fine mesh strainer, into fermentation grade, pressure-resistant bottles. (Wine/champagne bottles works great too!) Cover tightly with a lid, and leave it out at room temperature overnight to let it develop more bubbles, then refrigerate until chilled before drinking.
4. Drink it on it’s own, or mix it with some beer for a extra fun time! 

Fermentation Tips

• Like all home-made fermented products, you want to be careful as there’s a chance that bad bacteria could grow. So if you see some fuzzy, colourful mould growing, it's probably best to toss it out.
• Sometimes a thin white film with some bubbles trapped in it will form, as it did for my first batch. This should be okay! (I'm not dead... yet.)
• The key to preventing bad bacteria from growing is to make sure that everything you're using is super clean, from your fermentation jar to the masher to your hands. Some recipes suggest sterilising all your equipment, but I feel this is a bit of a chore, so I just make sure to wash everything pretty cleanly and hope for the best. Worked for me so far!
• More importantly though, a better indicator of whether your ferment has gone off is to use your senses! Give it a smell (maybe a taste if you like living on the edge), and if it's offputting / a bit too funky for your liking, throwing it out is probably your best bet.

With the rise of Photoshop, VSCO, and the hundreds of other photo-editing apps out there, even the dreariest dishes can be made to look like a fanciful feast, creating an internet that is now saturated with millions of recipes presented as 'amazing', 'delicious', 'best you've ever tasted' versions of themselves. But really, when you think about it, can all 1001 recipes for the ‘greatest’ or 'ultimate' salad, cookie, or unicorn cake truly live up to their name..?

Oops, sorry for sounding a little cynical there. I'm not discounting the fact that most recipes out there are super gratifying, making you feel like a real pro when you get them right. But I've also had experiences with recipes that even when followed to a tee, look nothing like what their photos promised, which is suuuper annoying. Rarely do you see recipes admitting to be these mediocre, 6/10 dishes. Instead, all published recipes must be, or at least seem to be, 10/10, outright amazing recipes. This in turn has perhaps created a fallacy that all these chefs, recipe writers, and food bloggers can do no wrong, that everything recipe or dish they think up must be pure magic. 

What's sorely missed then, is the hours of tireless research and tests it takes to end up with a truly great recipe. What's missed is the recipes and ideas that didn't make the cut, that shows the human side of cooking. What's missed is the fun exploration of epic failures that contains little lessons and nuggets of wisdom we could all learn from. For instance, there's probably no good way of making a durian-flavoured liquor, or trying to work fish into dessert say (🤮), but it would sure make for an interesting read! (Or am I just plain weird?) 

And trust me, in my short span of time being a cook / food blogger, I've had my fair share of spectacular failures. Like the time I thought it’d be a great idea to make a super alcoholic sorbet that ended up never freezing, because I forgot alcohol freezes at -114°C, nearly 100°C lower than your average freezer. (As a chemical engineer, I was very disappointed in myself.) Or the time when I got very distracted by FIFA and forgot about a pot of mussels on the stove. (Sorry Vic!) Or the time I made a mango lassi that ended up unintentionally poisoning half the Blue Hill staff... God that was a nightmare, sorry guys!!! Without exploring and learning from these mistakes, I would've remained a  pretty shitty cook. (Tbh I probably still am...) But it's these mistakes, and the whole risk-reward factor of trying to come up with new dishes, that makes cooking all the more gratifying! 

So in an effort to share a side of cooking that rarely gets to see the light, and to promote a little self-honesty, here's a recipe that is very much a work-in-progress. On I similar note, I also hereby pledge to always be critical of my own creations, especially if they're truly bleh, because I know just how frustrating it is when recipes don't turn out the way you expect them to. 

While I wouldn't recommend following the recipe laid out below every step of the way (unless your end goal is a very-mediocre focaccia), if you're up for a bit of experimenting, you can riff off the suggestions I've provided below and try to come up with something great! This is sorta like crowd-sourced recipe development, eh? :P  

- - -

The Plan

I’ve had focaccia on my mind for the longest time. So when I came across Saltie’s focaccia recipe on Food52, I knew it was time to make one. But me being me, I didn’t want to make just any old focaccia; I wanted one that was weird and audacious, but also had the potential to be great. So for whatever reason I ended up trying to make a kombu-flavoured focaccia.

I started off with the Food52 recipe, which, according to 350+ ratings, was real good. But in my deviousness, I made two significant changes, one in terms of taste and the other texture. In hindsight, these alterations probably harmed the recipe more than it helped.

Anyway, first, to make it taste of kombu, I added some dried kombu powder to the recipe (made by drying kombu/kelp in an oven at low temperature, then pulverising it in a blender). I also ended up adding some mushroom powder (made in a similar manner) to bump up the umami since kombu is quite a subtle flavour. 

Next, with the end goal of a frickin-fluffy focaccia, I messed with the ratio of flour:water. I heard somewhere that “a wetter dough is a better dough”, so I thought I’d be real smart and make a super wet, sticky dough that would hopefully yield a really light, airy bread. 

The Problems

Now let me preface this by saying there’s probably nothing wrong with Saltie’s recipe. The issues with this probably stemmed from my own tinkering of a solid recipe. 

Now when I set out to make a kombu focaccia, I wanted it to at least taste a little of kombu, of that salty briny sea kelp, like a whiff of sea breeze brushing against your cheek as you stroll across the sandy beach. This did not do that; It just tasted like a regular focaccia, with some dark bits of kombu speckled throughout the dough. Disappointing.

The second, probably bigger problem was that the dough ended up being a little too wet to handle. Perhaps to a master baker, working with this dough wouldn't be a problem, but with this being my second time ever making focaccia, I might've been slightly out of my depth. I ended up adding more flour to the dough until it was at a stickiness level that I was comfortable with, and in the process probably worked the dough way too much, which explains why the bread was a little tough and chewy post-bake. Sad. 

The Panacea

(Re: the title. Yes I have an addiction to alliteration. Sorryyy.)

Honestly this focaccia recipe wasn’t bad per se; My family polished off all the focaccia within 2 days after all, as breakfast sandwiches or a mid-afternoon snack. But it was just a little underwhelming, not displaying enough kombu flavour, and with a texture much too hard for my liking. It definitely still needs a few tweaks, so here are some notes for future-me (or you!) to iterate off.

To bump up the kombu flavour, I'd try upping the amount of kombu used. Or perhaps instead of grinding it down into a powder, it'd be a better bet to infuse the kombu in water to extract the flavour out, then use that kombu-flavoured water to make the dough. Also, maybe a little soy sauce would help! (Soy sauce in bread sounds a little odd I know, but it could work to bolster the umami I'm looking for!)

Also, it's important to not knead the dough too much, as I probably did when trying to correct for the consistency of the dough. So either start of with the right flour:water ratio, or be super gentle when adjusting it to reach the right hydration. 

In any case, here's the recipe I started off with, bared for y'all to see, learn from, and possibly help improve upon! 😊

- - -

Kombu Focaccia

makes one 18 x 13-inch (46 x 33 cm) focaccia, or half a sheet pan’s worth; recipe adapted from Saltie’s Focaccia on Food52.

Ingredients

800g flour
2 tbsp salt
1 tsp yeast
2 pieces (~20g) kombu
2-3 pieces (~10g) dried mushrooms, shiitake or cepes would work well
800g water
60ml olive oil, plus more for oiling baking tray
5g sea salt
3-5 sprigs of rosemary, optional
 

Directions

1. Blend the kombu and dried mushrooms together until they turn into a fine powder. It’s essential that the kombu and mushrooms are fully dry and contains no moisture at all. If they’re not fully dried, dry them in a dehydrator or an oven set at 70°C for at least 1 hour, or for up to 12 hours until they’re completely dry.
2. Sift the flour, salt, yeast, kombu and mushroom powder into a large bowl. Add the water to the flour mixture and mix with a wooden spoon or spatula until a sticky dough forms. Don’t knead it too much as it’ll cause the dough to be tough and chewy post-bake.
3. Pour half of the olive oil into a separate large container or bowl. (This container bowl should be ~3 times as large as the focaccia bowl.) Transfer the focaccia dough into the container, and pour the rest of olive oil around the sides of the dough, lifting the dough around the sides and letting the oil run down the sides. This helps the dough not stick too much to the container. Place the container in the refrigerator to proof for at least 8 hours, or for up to 2 days.
4. After the proof, the dough should be really poofy and pillow-y. Oil a baking tray (this recipe is meant for 18x13 baking trays, but it could work for smaller or larger ones too, though your focaccia will be slightly taller/flatter depending on the size of the tray.) Transfer the dough to the oiled tray, then using your fingers, spread the dough so it covers the whole tray. Add the oil from the proofing bowl as needed to prevent the dough from sticking to the tray. Leave the dough at room temperature for around 30-60 minutes, until it doubles in size.
5. Now using your fingertips, poke dimples on the surface of the focaccia dough and to get that characteristic crater-y focaccia crust. Bake the dough in an oven preheated to 220°C for 15-20 minutes, rotating halfway through the baking time, until the top is all a uniform golden brown.
6. When done, slide the focaccia off the baking tray onto a wire rack to cool down. It’s best eaten fresh out of the oven!

Before you read on, I should give you fair warning – this is a slighhtttly self-absorbed post, as I talk about this unnecessarily fancy dinner I cooked for my family a few weeks ago. Now before you think I’m this filial Asian son who often cooks for his parents though, this dinner was really more of a one-off thing to prove to them that I can actually cook. Just kidding, I actually did it to vie for the position of favourite child. 😉 (Your move, little siblings.)

But really, the main reason I'm sharing about this dinner is because I made something that was unexpectedly good! But since I have a knack for going off on a tangent, lemme tell you ALL about the dinner first. (Skip to the recipe if you can't stand slightly-narcissistic me. Heh.) 

Now I've always shied away from calling myself a chef, or even a cook for that matter. (I'm really not, especially when compared to other, actual chefs out there who are actually mad-skilled and who crush the line every day.) But after seeing how well this dinner went down, I can't help but feel a slight bit cheffy, and majorly chuffed too. 

Of course, being a fancy-shmancy dinner, I had to go all out and have a running theme to tie all the dishes together. So I came up with the terribly-titled theme of "Japanese-y", or "Japanese, but not really". Horrible title, I know. But I chose it because i) I don't actually know how to cook proper, traditional Japanese food, and ii) even if I did, my haphazard style of cooking will have me end up with dishes that aren't truly Japanese anyway.

It was a 5-course dinner, with each dish having some tentative link to Japanese food, but not enough to call it truly Japanese. I swear if real chefs were to read through this, they'd be shaking their heads in disapproval. But if anything, I think this is pretty true to my weird af thought-process when it comes to cooking and creating dishes, and I had plenty of fun with it, and that’s what matter the most, no? (Gosh I’ve gone soft.)

So here are the 5 dishes I made:

Tsukemono (a.k.a. Japanese pickles)
This was really just six random pickles I made, none of them exactly in the style of a traditional Japanese pickle. (Don’t shoot me.) I wrote about them in this pickle post from a few weeks back.

Mushroom Tempura
This was not really just a mushroom tempura, because there were 4 different types of mushrooms each cooked differently (mostly enoki tempura, but also pickled maitake, raw eryngii, and a seared shroom that I don't know the name of). I also made a black garlic aioli dip for the dish, which was pure umami goodness (less to do with me, more to do with how good of an ingredient black garlic is; Ooh check out this black garlic chocolate cookies by Posie Harwood btw!)

"Okonomiyaki"
Again, this wasn't an okonomiyaki per se. (Do you see the pattern now..? 😋) For this dish, I just took the flavours of a traditional Japanese pancake and worked it into a charred cabbage dish. I split a cabbage into eighths, and seared and basted them in kombu butter. There was also the typical okonomiyaki ingredients involved - Japanese mayo, smoky okonomiyaki sauce, scallions, and seaweed.

Kakigori
You know the drill now. This was not exactly kakigori, but a watermelon granita with some gin and cucumber agar jelly. Tbh, it might be slightly contentious to actually call this kakigori (tbh this whole menu is pretty contentious/heretical). 

"Chawanmushi"
And finally, my favourite of the lot! The chawanmushi that isn't actually a chawanmushi. I started off with the idea of making a dessert that looked like a chawanmushi (savoury Japanese egg custard), but was in fact a pannacotta. (They have very similar textures, so the bluff is pretty convincing.) But then I thought, just to make it that bit more legit, I'll add some ikura / fish roe, which is sometimes used as a garnish on chawanmushi. Or should I say "ikura", because these were actually tapioca pearls dyed in a bit of orange & beetroot syrup! Ooh, and for the piece de resistance, I hid some red bean paste at the base of the cup, so that just so when you thought all the dish had was a bluff in name, out pops another surprise!

I admit I got quite amused coming up with this recipe, and I clearly got a bit carried away there with the concept, haha. Though from the photos, I agree that it doesn't look entirely convincing. The faux-ikura especially could be made more realistic. Also, serving it in a glass kinda gave away the surprise, so ideally it should be served in chawanmushi cups/mugs. (I did eventually serve these in green teacups you see in the photos below though, so it's all good.) 

But for what its worth, I had plenty of fun creating and making this dish. Plus, the taste alone is more than reason enough to make it! It's no secret that I've always had a thing for red bean; It's gloriously comforting, like reading a good book by the fireplace on a cold winter's night. But little did I expect, when paired with creamy, rich panna cotta, not only was it just as hygge-inducing, it gave the red bean a deep sense of sophistication and sexiness. It's essentially like reading a good book by the fireplace, only now you're lying on the coziest futon taking sips of steamy hot cocoa, with your favourite woolly jumper on and a bit of slow jazz playing on the antique record player. 

Sure, it's one of the longer recipes on the blog, but I think it's well worth the effort, if purely for the looks of confusion -> surprise -> bliss as your family and friends gorge on them. Priceless. This is why I cook. 😊

- - -

Adzuki Panna Cotta (a.k.a. "Chawanmushi")

makes 4-6 portions

Ingredients

Red bean paste
100g red beans
20g sugar
300g water
1 tbsp coconut milk

Panna cotta
15g (~4 teaspoons) gelatine powder
90ml milk, or water
500g cream
100g caster sugar, can be substituted for 50g caster sugar + 50g gula melaka
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

“Ikura”
100g sugar
200g water
1 orange, shave off strips of peel (save them!), plus the juice too
1 knob of turmeric
½ a small beetroot, blended with ~1 tbsp of water then sifted to get the juice, alternatively use 2 tbsp ready beetroot juice
100g small sago / tapioca pearls
 

Directions

1. Red bean paste: Soak the red bean in water for 2 hours, or up to 12 hours/overnight. After soaking, drain off the water and transfer the red bean to a pot. To this, add the sugar and water. Bring it to a boil and turn it down to a simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, until the beans are almost breaking apart and is a thick, pasty consistency. Stir in the coconut milk and let the red bean paste cool down.
2. Panna cotta: Sprinkle the gelatine powder into the milk (or water), and leave it for 5-10 minutes to bloom/hydrate. Meanwhile, add the cream, sugar, and vanilla essence in a saucepan, and heat until it starts to steam. Add the gelatine mixture into the cream, bring it to a quick boil and immediately turn it down. Stir until all the gelatine dissolves, take it off the heat, and let the mixture cool down slightly (you still want it to be warm, not cold). 
3. Assembly:Now you’re ready to assemble! Ready a few small teacups/glasses. (Depending on the size of you cups/glasses, this recipe should yield 4-6 portions.) Place 40-50g (~3 tablespoons) of the red bean paste into the bottom of the cups. Tap the cups on a flat surface to level off the red bean paste. Then, pour the panna cotta mixture into the cups/glasses until about ¾ full. (If the panna cotta mixture has formed a skin as it was cooling in the saucepan, pour it through a sieve into the cups.)
4. Setting: Then, place plastic wrap over the top of the cups, and let the panna cotta set in the fridge for at least 3 hours so that it fully sets.
5. “Ikura” soaking syrup: In a saucepan, add the sugar, water, orange juice, orange peel, knob of turmeric, and beetroot juice. Bring to a boil, making sure the sugar dissolves fully, and let it simmer for 10-15 minutes for the flavours and colour to really meld together. You should have a deep orange (pinkish, even) liquid. Strain the liquid, and discard all the aromatic bits. Let the liquid cool to room temperature before transferring them to a small container.
6. "Ikura": Fill a separate medium pot two-thirds full with water, and bring to a rolling boil. Add in the tapioca pearls and stir continuously, maintaining that rolling boil. Let it cook this way for roughly 10 minutes, until the pearls turn translucent all the way through. Sift out the tapioca pearls, and immediately wash with running cold water (or plunge in an ice bath). Transfer the tapioca pearls into the orange syrup and let it chill in the fridge (literally) for at least a day, or up to 5 days.
7. Serve: Scoop out a teaspoon of faux-ikura, sans liquid, and place on top on the panna cotta. Be real tricksy and serve it as chawanmushi. ;)

Happy Pi Day!

I might be reinforcing a certain geeky Asian stereotype here, but posting a pie recipe on Pi Day was just too good of an opportunity to miss. And though I’ve long traded my pi-ridden add-maths notes in favour of actual pie, I still have so much love for maths and the sciences, and it's helped me in lotsa little ways in cooking. So in celebration of my favourite irrational constant in maths (tbh I only know of two; sorry e), I made a pie with the irreplaceable constant of Malaysian desserts – gula melaka. 

For the uniniated, gula melaka (apparently anglicised as Malacca sugar?) is a type of unrefined brown sugar ubiquitous in Malaysian desserts. They’re most commonly sold in solid, cylindrical blocks, which is often dissolved in a bit of water to make a syrup. But unlike similar looking unrefined sugars like jaggery and Mexican piloncillo, which are extracted from sugar cane, gula melaka is made from the sap collected from the flower stalks of coconut palm trees. This sap is boiled until thick and caramel-like, then poured into traditional bamboo moulds to cool and harden. Which is why they’re often shaped like a bamboo joint!

In terms of flavour, it’s evocative of a deep, dark caramel, but with none of the cloy. It’s often described as smoky, butterscotch-y, and spice-tinted too. It's essentially the Malaysian equivalent of PB&J, only 10 times better, and nowhere near as divisive.

Here’s a well-known formula for making great Malaysian desserts - gula melaka + coconut milk + pandan. And I'm serious when I say it's the flavour profile of Malaysian desserts. Just look up 'Malaysian dessert' on Google Images, and I kid you not, 4 in 5 images will have something green in it (that's the pandan), something white that's made of coconut milk, and something brown (gula melaka), though the latter is often hidden within the dessert itself (think ondeh-ondeh & kuih koci). And before you think of Malaysian desserts as uninventive or just lazy, I'm here to tell you that it's more the case that this flavour combination is just so utterly good that it's hard to find anything else that comes close in the world of desserts. 

Anyway, being Malaysian, it was clearly expected of me to want to add gula melaka into my Pi Day pie!

I started off with a base pecan pie recipe, an amalgamation of the dozen of pecan pie recipes I scoured on the internet. And to add a bit more character, I added a shot of espresso to the filling for a bit more depth, but more importantly, I replaced the bulk of the caster/brown sugar with the sweet nectar of the Malaysian dessert gods. I also shaved some extra gula melaka on top just to be extra (that culinary degree didn't go to waste). So have it on its own, or serve it with some damn good ice cream and you're all set. (OOH, try it with coconut/pandan ice cream maybe!)

Go make one. Or two. Or 3.1415926535897…

---

Gula Melaka Pecan Pie

makes one 12-inch, or two 8-inch pies

Ingredients

Pie dough
200g flour
100g butter, cubed and chilled
1 egg
½ tsp (approximately π grams) of salt
1 tbsp (15g) sugar

Filling
80g butter
300g gula melaka syrup, if using raw, melt 150g gula Melaka in 150g water
100g caster or granulated sugar
½ tsp (~πg) salt
1 shot espresso (~30g), optional (substitute with 30g water)
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
250g pecans

Directions

1. Pie dough: Place the flour in a mixer with the paddle attachment. Add in the cubes of butter and mix on medium-low until the flour-butter mixture turns sandy. Alternative, you can do this by hand. (But work quick before the butter melts!) Then, mix the egg, sugar, and salt together, and add it into the mixer and mix on low for about 10 seconds, until a dough forms. If the dough doesn’t come together, add one or two tablespoons of water and mix on low until dough forms. Wrap it in plastic and keep in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour, or overnight.
2. Filling: Melt the butter. To this, add the gula melaka syrup, caster sugar, salt, espresso, and vanilla extract. Finally, whisk in the eggs, making sure all the ingredients are well combined.
3. Now onto rolling out the dough. Flour your work surface well. Take the dough out of the refrigerator, and fold it onto itself 2-3 times to equilibrate the temperature all around the dough. Then, roll out the dough to a circle slightly larger (~1-2 inches more) than your tart pan. Transfer the rolled out dough into the tart pan, making sure it covers the bottom and fits snugly into the sides. (Use your fingers to gently lift the dough up, then place it into the sides. Roll the rolling pin over the rim of the tart pan to trim the excess dough. Then, gently indent the bottom of the dough with a fork. (This prevent bubbles forming within the dough during baking.)
4. Place the pecans into the dough, arranging them as you like. Then pour the filling mixture into the tart up to 4/5 up the sides.
5. Bake in an oven preheated to 180°C for 45 minutes to an hour, until the crust is a musky-brown.
6. Remove from the oven and transfer to a cooling rack. Remove from the tart pan, slice into 6-12 pieces (4 pieces if you're feeling extra gluttonous; or π pieces if you're up for a challenge).

Anyone who’s seen the top shelf of my fridge knows that I’m a bit of a pickle freak. Pickling has been the answer to many “oh shit I bought more (insert vegetable/fruit) than I know what to do with” moments.

Ginger, cucumber, carrot, nectarine, beetroot, I’ve tried pickling them all, alongside slightly weirder, experimental ones like jackfruit, ferns, mushrooms, and watermelon rind. It’s almost magical really, what a little vinegar, sugar and time can do to most foods. Not only will pickling your produce make them last longer, it also puts an interesting spin on familiar flavours, which is also a go-to technique in many chefs’ arsenal for bringing a little more zing & pop to dishes.

Think of the ever-present tsukemono (Japanese pickles) in Japanese cuisine. They’re those pink slivers of pickled ginger, tart umeboshis, yellow radishes, shiso-dyed cucumbers, or any other pickle that are often served alongside heavier dishes to bring balance to a meal. Or take the simple dill pickle - what starts off as a crisp, refreshing cucumber ends up being briny, punchy and zingy after just a few days in pickling liquid (or better yet, if it was lacto-fermented; but that’s a technique for another time).  

Now while the question of "How to Pickle?" is seemingly straightforward to answer, every chef/home cook has their own go-to pickling recipe and technique, which complicates things. Some swear by the 2:1:1 ratio (2 parts vinegar to 1 part water to 1 part sugar). Others use a modified 5:3:2:1 or 9:5:3:1 (vinegar:water:sugar:salt). Some start off the pickling process hot, others will insist on waiting for the pickling liquid to cool down. Some are satisfied with an overnight pickle, others will leave their produce to pickle for weeks before even tasting it. 

So while it might seem like we should just all agree on one standardised pickling method, it’s only in the nature of this industry for everyone to have clashing opinions, resulting in a whole spectrum of pickles! Just search for a basic pickling recipe on Google, and you’ll get like 53829 wildly different variations. (This one's my favourite. 😉) It might seem crazy and chaotic, but it's also why I'm so fond of the whole process and industry of food and cooking!

And if you’re wondering, I too have my own tendencies and habits when it comes to pickling. But I'm also a firm believer in loving any and all pickles, so I'd like to think I'm not that fussy... Still, if you've never pickled anything in your life, it might seem like a really daunting task. Now I'm no Sandor Katz, but if you’d allow me to, here’s a small, simple guide to pickling, plus two recipes to get you started on your next obsessive hobby! It's built upon an experimental, self-discovery approach to cooking that I'm particular fond of, so to the sticklers for proper cooking methods out there, I apologise in advance for any mistakes I made/rules I broke here. 

---

When it comes to pickling, there are three, generally-agreed-upon key ingredients - vinegar, sugar and water. Some consider salt a necessary fourth ingredient too. The sugar (and salt) is dissolved (and often heated) in the vinegar and water to make the pickling liquid, which is then poured into a clean jar/container with the produce-to-be-pickled. The pickle is then set aside for a few days (or weeks), absorbing the flavour of the pickling liquid through osmosis.

To start off your next pickling project, try a simple pickling liquid ratio of 2:1:1 (2 parts vinegar to 1 part water and 1 part sugar) and see if you like it. For the vinegar, you can use rice vinegar, white wine vinegar, cider vinegar, or any other vinegar really (though some eschew using dark, sweet vinegars like balsamic and sweet rice vinegar; I’m not fussed). Same goes for the sugar; Try different sugars depending on the flavour profile you're going for (white for a cleaner flavour, brown/unrefined for a deeper, less-upfront sweetness).

As for additional aromatics, anything is game really! Try adding some spices (cinnamon, star anise, and cloves are my go-to for a sweet pickle) or herbs (dill is always a safe bet), or even some heat (garlic, pepper, ginger, and chili comes to mind). Taste is subjective, so play around with different combinations and discover what you like!

For me, I started off with a safe 5:3:2:1 ratio when I was in the US. But on coming back to Malaysia, I realised that the rice vinegar here was a lot harsher than the one I was used to in the US, so I dropped down the amount of vinegar. Plus, being back home also changed the level I generally season to, so I cut down the amount of salt in my pickling recipe too. So my current recipe is more of a 10:9:5:1, which is a mouthful, I know. But then again, I only use this ratio as a guide, going by taste most of the time, adding a splash of vinegar or a smattering of spices as I see fit.

As you can probably tell, the rules are really loose when it comes to pickling, so let loose, play around with different flavour combinations, and let your experimental-self run riot!

---

Sweet Pickled Nectarines

Ingredients

2 firm nectarines
200ml rice vinegar
200ml water
150g caster/granulated sugar
1 cinnamon stick
2 star anise
4 cloves
 

Directions

1. Slice the nectarines in half and remove the pits. Then slice into half-moon slices. Place into a clean container/jar. (A kilner/mason jar works well.)
2. Combine the vinegar, water, sugar, and spices in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and take off the heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar.
3. Pour the hot pickling liquid into the jar, spices and all, until the nectarines are covered.
4. Leave the jar ajar (pun very much intended 😜) to let it cool to room temperature. Then cover and store in the refrigerator.
5. These pickled nectarines will be ready to consume within 2 days, but they can keep for 2-3 months, or more if they’re sealed and stored well! The flavour will intensify the longer they're stored.

---

Balsamic Pickled Mushrooms

Ingredients

A handful (~100g) of shimeji mushrooms, or any other small, firm ‘shrooms
150ml rice vinegar
50ml balsamic vinegar
160ml water
100g brown sugar
20g salt
1 bay leaf
 

Directions

1. Separate the shimeji mushrooms into individual pieces (if using other mushrooms, separate them into smaller pieces as you see fit). Then clean the mushrooms under clean, running water. Place them into a clean container/jar. (A kilner/mason jar works well.)
2. Combine the rice vinegar, balsamic vinegar, water, sugar, salt and bay leaf in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and take off the heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt.
3. Pour the hot pickling liquid into the jar until the mushrooms are covered.
4. Leave the jar open and let cool to room temperature. Then cover and store in the refrigerator.
5. They’ll be ready to consume within 24 hours, but they can keep for up to 2-3 months, or more if they’re sealed and stored well. Remember, the flavour will intensify the longer they're stored. 

Let’s talk bone broth. Sure, it’s touted by many dieticians as the supposed magic elixir for wellbeing. More importantly though (to me at least), it’s the base ingredient for many of the heartiest, soul-warming soups out there. 

Think back to that pumpkin soup you had at that one cafe that tasted so darn good you suspect they add MSG into it, or to the chicken soup / ABC soup / what-have-you soup your mom used to make that was so simple but was somehow so comforting and hygge-inducing. Let’s face it, while purely vegetarian/vegan soups can be good, the ingredient that makes a good soup great is more often than not the addition of the flesh and bones that’s been boiled to brittleness, all its flavour leeched out into the broth, elevating it to umami-sweet greatness.

So surely no truly vegetarian soup can compete with the punchy, umami-sweet flavour of bone broth / stock-based soups. Or so I thought...

Long story short(-ish), now that my sister is vegetarian (kudos to you Jia), all the soups (and many of the dishes) we make at home has had to be made sans meat or bones. My first thought was that it was gonna be real hard to make soups taste as good as those with a bone broth base. But my mom, being the domestic goddess she is, whipped up a new trick straight out of that admirably ad-hoc, endlessly experimental brain of hers. To account for the sorely missed savoury-sweetness you usually get from bones, she added… coconut water! GENIUS.

I know, it’s slightly out there as far as recipes go. But trust me, it works. While coconut water does not make soups taste meaty (if only, eh?), the subtle sweetness from it serves as a better-than-expected substitute for the salty-sweetness that you get off regular bone broths. So much so that the first time I drank a coconut-water-instead-of-pork-bone-broth ABC soup my mom made, I couldn’t even tell the difference, until she sneakily admitted it! (Or maybe I just have terrible tastebuds.)

She recently made a lotus root and peanut soup, a staple of Chinese (Teochew?) cooking, again using coconut water in place of bone broth. And gosh the resulting broth was so viscerally comforting and umami-sweet, it just went and reinforced this wild, slight (coco)nuts concept for me. Vegan soups never tasted this good! So I'm a convert, which explains why her recipe is now here on the blog.

Now excuse me while I go slurp up some of this veggie goodness.

---

Coconut Water Lotus Root Soup

serves 3

Ingredients

1 lotus roots, peeled but not sliced
50g peanuts
10g salt
1 litre water
750ml coconut water
5-10 dried red dates
 

Directions

1. Soak the peanuts for at least 30 minutes, or for up to 12 hours.
2. Add the soaked peanuts, lotus root, and salt into a large pot and fill with water, making sure all the ingredients are submerged. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. Cover and let it cook for 4-5 hours, until the peanuts are all soft and mushy. (Alternatively, you can use a pressure cooker, in which case you’ll only need to cook it for roughly 45 minutes.)
3. Now, remove the lotus root from the soup. Let it cool until cold enough to handle and slice them width-wise into roughly 1cm thick slices. Then plop the sliced pieces back into the soup.
4. Add in the coconut water and red dates to the soup, and bring it back to boil, then simmer for another 15 minutes.
5. Serve scalding hot.

So this post didn’t start out as a listicle. Honest. I just made some pineapple tarts for Chinese New Year and was planning to just write the recipe for it and how it’s tied to the festive period. But while digging deep into my food research, I found out that these tarts aren't exactly the traditional Chinese New Year staples that I first assumed they were! And by traditional I mean from China (because, Chinese New Year).

These tarts have a really interesting backstory. If you look at where they were popularised (Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan mostly), you’ll find that they developed from the Chinese diaspora that migrated South to escape the war and politics of the mainland in the early-20th century. So in the modern New Year celebrations of Malaysia, Taiwan, and several other Southeast Asian countries, pineapple tarts very much take centre stage. Whereas in China, pineapple tarts rarely make an appearance during the New Year, if at all. See, food culture is super interesting, no? :D

I delved into this in greater depth in an article I wrote for literally my favourite food website - Food52!!! AHH I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE IT GOT ON THE SITE! <3

There's also a recipe for pineapple tarts at the end of this post. I was surprised with how well they turned out first time round, though the dough was a tad crumbly (not a bad thing, just more finicky to work with). I highly encourage you to make them if you’ve never tried pineapple tarts! I also made some in the shape of hamantaschens, resulting in these totally non-conformist, Molly Yeh-inspired Jewish-Chinese cookies. (Please don't shut down my site, JAKIM / Malaysia's Islamic government.)

In any case, my research got me thinking. There are actually a bunch of other foods/dishes that us Malaysians have naturally associated with Chinese New Year, assuming they’re part of ancient New Year tradition. But really, they’re very recent, wholly Malaysian additions to the New Year spread. And thank god for them.

So here’s the list of 8 Chinese New Year foods that are really more Malaysian than Chinese.

1. Nian gao in coconut

Starting off this list is a pretty old-school dish. For the uninitiated, nian gao is a hard, toffee-like rice cake made of glutinous rice flour, water, and sugar. They’re super tacky and close to inedible in their original form, but are sinfully divine (great oxymoron there btw) when heated up.

Nian gaos definitely originated from China, but the kind that is steamed and rolled in a flurry of freshly shredded coconut, resembling little candy-pillows? 100% Malaysian. (I think.)

2. Yee sang

Okay this is a weird one.

It’s basically a plate of initially separate strands of veggies, condiments (commonly carrots, radishes, peanuts, mushrooms and seaweed maybe, oftentimes fish), which is then mixed by everyone around the table at the same time with their chopsticks, all trying to outdo each other by tossing the food higher and higher. Sounds like a very weird ritual, yes, but also just really messy fun. Also very Malaysian. I didn't know no one really does this in China until a few years ago.

3. Peanut cookies

To make your Chinese New Year truly Malaysian, you need lotsa cookies or snacks for munching on when you’re not busy having an extended breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Yup, in Malaysia, the Chinese New Year celebration is really just 80% eating and 20% making money from red packets/gambling. 

Of all the cookies, peanut cookies are the simplest, most straightforward ones. Basically what it says on the tin. They were also my favourite (besides pineapple tarts), until I discovered I’m slightly allergic to peanuts.

4. Kuih bahulu (a.k.a. Malaysian madeleines!?)

Bouncy, airy, often so dry it sucks up all the saliva in your mouth and you gasp for breath trying to swallow it. Some people call them Malaysian madeleines, but they’re a far cry from those buttery génoise pillow that are the OG madeleines. Still, very much a Malaysian New Year snack.

5. Love letters

Yet another super popular New Year snack. They’re also known as kuih kapit, and are essentially really thin, egg-based tuiles. They’re traditionally baked over a charcoal fire in a really cool mould, often with oriental designs on them. They’re then folded into quarters or into a scroll (to resemble a love letter, I’m guessing).

6. Murukku

Yes, murukkus are not Chinese. (They’re Indian.) But again, like the myriad of cookies/snacks already mentioned, they’re non-negotiable for a truly Malaysian Chinese New Year.

Weird to have an Indian snack so prominent in Chinese New Year culture, I know. But this is just what makes Malaysia such a great, multi-cultural country! (Well, great only when the politicians aren’t busy embezzling money, which is basically never.)

7. Durian

Okay they’re technically not a New Year food. But this year’s durian season just so happen to coincide with the New Year, so I’m sure durian will be on lotsa families’ tables over the festive period! They’re also golden, which gives them extra CNY points.

Also can I just say this durian season is a joke because we’ve already had like a continuous 5 months of durian. Ridiculous. Not that I’m complaining…

8. Pineapple tarts

But of course. Go make them, I promise you won’t regret it! 

Also, Happy Chinese New Year!

- - -

Pineapple Tarts

makes ~50 tarts

Ingredients

Pineapple jam
1 medium pineapple
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves
1 star anise
½ tsp (3g) vanilla essence
50g sugar, or more depending on the sweetness of the pineapple.

Tart dough
220g all-purpose flour
25g cornflour
5g salt
115g butter, cut into small cubes and chilled
2 egg yolks
30g caster sugar
30g water, plus more if the dough is too crumbly

Eggwash
1 egg
1 tbsp water

Directions

Pineapple jam

1. Remove the skin and eyes of the pineapple, and slice the pineapple flesh and core into medium-sized chunks. (I didn’t discard the core as I like the bit of texture it adds to the jam.) Blend pineapple in a food processor/blender until semi-smooth (around 30 seconds on high). 
2. Pour the blended pineapple into a wide pan/pot, then add in the sugar and spices (cinnamon, cloves, star anise, vanilla).
3. Let it simmer on medium heat until it reaches the consistency of a thick marmalade, which should take around 1-1 ½ hours. Stir every 5 minutes or so to prevent any bits from catching on the bottom and burning. 
4. When the mixture thickens into a jammy consistency, remove the spices. Then taste and add more sugar if needed. Transfer the jam into a bowl/container and refrigerate when cool.

Making the dough, plus baking

1. First, sift the all-purpose flour, cornflour, and salt together, and place in a standing mixer with a paddle attachment. Add the cold cubes of butter into the flour mixture and mix on medium until it reaches a sandy texture (this should take 30-60 seconds). Then, whisk the sugar, egg yolks, and water together and add this to the flour mixture. Mix briefly until a dough forms. (If still very crumbly, add one or two extra tablespoons of water until dough comes together.)
2. Roll the dough into a ball, flatten slightly, and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, or up to 2 days.
3. Take the dough out of the fridge, and knead it a few times to equalise the temperature all around the dough. On a well-floured surface, roll the dough out until 1/6 inch thick (~4mm).
4. Cut circles out of the dough using a ring cutter (I find 7 or 8cm ones work best). Place 1 teaspoon (~8g) of the pineapple jam onto the centre of the dough circles. Fold in the sides, making sure the pineapple jam is concealed. Gently shape and roll into a ball. To make it oblong, pinch it in the middle and roll it lengthwise to get it to shape. Be gentle!
5. Using a knife, score a crosshatch pattern on the top of the pineapple tarts so they resemble pineapple eyes! Place the tarts on a lined baking tray, and brush a thin layer of eggwash on them. Bake for 20 minutes in an oven preheated to 190°C, until delightfully golden.
6. Enjoy! And as they say over Chinese New Year – “Ong lai!” (which is the word for pineapple in the Hokkien dialect, but is also a homonym for “come here, wealth!”)

I know, it’s weird, pretty cheesy, maybe even facepalm-worthy, but those are also the exact words people have used to describe me. So in embracing this odd, geeky, maybe vaguely cool(?) side of me (jk I’m not cool), I've decided - out with Toffee & Tea, in with Jun & Tonic.

- - -

Skeptical about this whole "planning for the future" shebang? So am I, so am I. *got my fingers crossed though*

Not that I didn’t like the name Toffee & Tea though! I did initially like how it alliterates (I'm weird like that), but truth be told, I stuck with it mostly because all the other vaguely clever blog names I could come up with were taken (until now, that is). So I started with Toffee & Tea three years ago, with the first posts being about my cooking exploits in a medieval Cambridge dorm with my roommate at the time, who now that I think about it, was quite possibly the one who set me off on this whole food career. (Here's your credit, Tam-sy. :P). Unfortunately for you guys, and luckily for me, those embarrassing first posts have been lost to the depths of the internet since I messed around with web hosting.

Anyway, I don't know why I thought blogging was a good idea at the time, but since then, I've continued posting about food, recipes, cooking failures and disasters, or any random musings about food really. But in those three years, this blog has always played second fiddle to whatever bigger thing I was doing at the time, whether it was college, culinary school, internships, or working in the States. It was partly because I was busy with those things, but mostly because I just lacked the self-discipline to post consistently and took ages to write. 

- - -

But this year, along with this name change, I want to write about food a little more. I want to continue learning about food, about its intersections with culture, science, politics, memories, life in general. I want to discover the lesser known food stories in Malaysia and beyond, and tell it to the world like they deserve to be told (like this little short essay I did for NeoCha about Malaysian cheese!). Most of all, I want to fall deeper in love with food and cooking.

Because in the three years since I first forayed into this food-journey-soul-searching-thing (really just another version of Eat Pray Love eh?), I think I've found something worthwhile, something fulfilling, something to pour my heart into. I might even go so far as to say I've found my passion..? (Blergh, that word. Gosh how did I get so sentimental?? Kill me already.)

- - -

So here’s me growing up. Here's me pledging to write more this year, to contribute to this volatile food industry that is so broken in places, yet contains so many hidden gems, capable of engaging all the human senses and emotions like nothing else. Here's me embracing my inner food geek that bit more, sharing my joy and passion *cringe* for food. And so, symbolic to this shift in focus, I'm swapping out my (toffee &) tea for a grown-ass G&T. (Wait, hold up. Naming a blog after a cocktail isn’t exactly the most grownup thing to do now is it..? Am I really just becoming more basic!?)

Maybe this all sounds a bit idealistic, but I know I've barely scratched the surface when it comes to learning about food. I also know (from what little SEO I have) that I’ve still got a long way to go in terms of blogging and writing. And though I’ll probably never be as cool as Molly Yeh, who lives and blogs on a farm, or be able to cook and speak about food as well as Bourdain or Dan Barber, or have the aesthetic eye of amazing photographers like Linda Lomelino or Our Food Stories, or be as ruthless with prose as Mandy Lee and her pups, or achieve the writing heights of MFK Fisher and Michael Pollan, I still want to do this because I love food, and I want others to love it too. 

So for better or worse, Jun & Tonic is here to stay. Well, maybe at least until I am spontaneously inspired by yet another blog name change / called to return to work at another kitchen somewhere in the world / get distracted by the 82798 things that I could possibly get distracted by. Kidding. But for now, I will walk this path and see where it takes me.

For now, I will write for food.

(P.S. Dear reader, please keep me accountable because I am terrible at self-discipline, and procrastination is still my best friend. Much thanks, Jun.)

The recipe in question is for Pulut Tai Tai. It’s a sweet glutinous rice cake that is a staple in Peranakan cuisine, often eaten with a dollop of kaya (or many dollops if you’re anything like me). I'm not entirely sure about the etymology behind the name, but as far as I know, pulut is glutinous rice and tai tai is cantonese for rich married woman/auntie, which means Pulut Tai Tai = glutinous rice for rich aunties..? Hmm... In all honesty though, this pulut dish would be considered pretty unremarkable if not for the marbled streaks of blue running through the rice. After all, blue is a very rare colour in the world of food. (Just try naming another blue food/ingredient!)

Traditionally, the cobalt blue for Pulut Tai Tai is extracted from butterfly pea flowers, which look like mini-orchids crossed with a certain female part (hint: its species name is Clitoria Ternatae). They’re not the easiest flower to source, even in South-East Asia, but luckily for me, mom planted some across the road several months ago, and they’ve been blooming non-stop ever since. It’s borderline annoying really. You spend a good half hour harvest them all one day, pat yourself on the back for a job well done, and then more pop up the very next day in a clear act of defiance. Silly flowers.

So yes, this poem is about those flowers. I might look back at this in ten years and cringe so so hard, but this seems like a good idea right now, so what the hell. 

- - -

Poem Tai Tai

Blue flowers.
Those brazenly blue flowers.
Fifty, a hundred, two hundred of them.
Speckled on the three bushes across the road
like Pollock spilled blue paint.

Blue flowers,
Oh they’re so nice, pick them before they go away,
It’d be such a waste,
mom says.

Blue flowers.
They’re butterfly pea flowers (Wikipedia tells me),
also clitoria something or other, because they look like clits.

Blue flowers,
I mean butterfly clit pea flowers,
I should know what they’re called now,
since I picked them the other day.

Fifty, a hundred, two hundred of them.
They came back the very next day.

Jun, go pick them again,
mom says.

- - -

Wow. Didn’t know I had that much angst in me.

Moving swiftly on, let's talk recipe. The method itself is dead simple - you soak some rice, stir in the colour from the flower, steam it, mix it. Done-o. Not much of a story there. Plus, you could technically do without the colour as it only lends colour not flavour. This is not to discount how good it can taste though! Warm it up, dunk it in some good ol' kaya (coconut jam), and bam you’ve got a Nyonya party in your mouth. Go make some!

- - -

Pulut Tai Tai

makes ~30 pieces, serves 4

Ingredients

500g glutinous rice
200g coconut milk
~200g water, to cover rice
2 pandan leaves, optional
20 butterfly pea flowers, optional (as it only lends colour not flavour)
20g sugar
2g salt

200g kaya (coconut jam), or more. Store-bought ones are generally good, but if you want to make it from scratch, here's my recipe for pandan kaya.

Method

1. Butterfly pea extract (if using fresh flowers): Wash flowers well, then put them into a small saucepan along with ~50ml of water, bring to the boil, let cool for 10 minutes, then strain to get blue extract.
2. Rinse glutinous rice in cold water until water runs clear. Then soak for 4-6 hours, or overnight.
3. Strain out the rice and discard the water, then separate rice into two (non-perforated) steaming baskets/bowls/trays. Add the blue dye to one of the portions of rice. 
4. Then, add an equal amount of coconut milk into both portions of rice, and add water to both until the rice is barely covered.
5. Place pandan leaves on top, then steam for 30-40 minutes, until cooked through (but not mushy!). 
6. Now add the blue rice to the white rice and mix very roughly to get a somewhat marbled effect. Then, place the mixed rice into a square tray and press down to compact it. (You can use gloves or a strong spatula to compress the rice so it doesn’t stick to your hand.)
7. Let it cool slightly, then cut it into whatever shape you fancy. Rectangles are the retro, minimal-waste way (see photos above).
8. Serve it with a dollop of kaya, and let the Nyonya party begin.

Cookies. Now there’s a treat that can bring a smile to a tearing toddler’s face, a word that harks back to the childhood memories in all of us. Those carefree days spent stuffing ourselves full of cookies, smearing semi-molten chocolate all over our faces, getting our hands stuck in cookie jars, refusing to let go of the five cookies in our hand despite knowing full well that the only way we could get our hand (and those cookies) out of the jar is by removing them one at a time.

Being the defining treat of our youth, we should all technically know what cookies are. But do we really..? Think about it, what makes a cookie a cookie? It’s such a simple question, and yet I struggled so hard in answering this, as you will soon find out. (Spoiler alert: there's no sure definition.) So may I present to you, my cookie musings: 

• So is it the shape that makes a cookie a cookie? Must all cookies be round? Is there such a thing as a square cookie / sqookie(!?)?
• If it isn't the shape, is it the texture then? But there's a myriad of textures a cookie can have - crispy, chewy, flaky, gooey, crumbly...
• Or is it the taste then? It's gotta be the taste. All cookies are sweet... right..? Wait, no. How about peanut butter cookies, or salted caramel ones, or dark chocolate + sea salt cookies? I'd say they're more savoury than sweet, and last I checked they're definitely still cookies.
• AH, maybe it's the topping then? All cookies must have a topping, yes? Consider a chocolate chip cookie without the chocolate chips, would it still be a cookie? Or are we more inclined to call it a biscuit? Ya I think I've cracked it, it's gotta be the toppings.
• Oh hmm... But how about shortbread cookies though? There aren't any toppings on them and yet we call them cookies instead of biscuits or bread (as their name confusingly implies)... Damnit I guess it isn't toppings. -_-
• Also, more importantly, can all cookies be trusted? (I got my eyes on you, you shifty cookie hiding in my browser background, asking for my permission to allow you in. The answer is no.)

SO. MANY. QUESTIONS.

In resolving such important life issues, I turned to Google, as one does. But here’s Google’s definition of a cookie: a sweet biscuit. Yup, that’s it. Thanks a bunch Google, that wasn’t helpful at all. And so the barrage of questions continue...

• Okay Google, if cookies are just sweet biscuits, do Oreos, Digestives, Tiger biscuits, and Jaffa Cakes all count as cookies!? Didn't think so, eh?
• (Ooh there’s this whole other is-Jaffa-Cake-a-biscuit-or-a-cake argument too, involving a couple of lawsuits and a human-sized Jaffa Cake baked just to prove a point. Have a read, it’s good stuff.)
• But okay, if cookies are definitely sweet, as Google's definition implies (but I disagree upon as explained above), what if I take a non-sweet biscuit, say a savoury Hup Seng cracker, dunk it in some Milo/coffee (thus making it sweet), does it then become a cookie..?
• Also where does the cookie label end?? Can I call anything and everything that is basically a sweet biscuit, a cookie? Does this mean NY cheesecakes with a sweet biscuit base can be renamed as an oddly-delicious sounding cheese-cookie-cake?
• And can the eponymous English tea and biscuits be replaced with… tea and cookies!? 

Alas, after much research, I came up with even more questions that would fill up this whole post and then some. Ah well, maybe this is just one of life’s many unanswerable questions.

So instead of pigeonholing cookies into a particular definition, I guess I’ll have to make do with leaving the definition wide open. But for as long as cookies exist, in whatever shape or form, sweet or savoury, chocolate-chipped or not, trustworthy or otherwise, I will be content, for as the Cookie Monster says:

"Today me will live in the moment unless it’s unpleasant in which case me will eat a cookie." - Cookie Monster

I know, you've just wasted 5 minutes of your life reading my nonsense musings on the definition of a cookie. I'm sorry. But to possibly make up for it, here’s a deceptively-basic-but-actually-well-researched cookie recipe, combining the wisdom of my three personal cookie gods - Kenji-Alt Lopez of science-y Food Lab fame, Butter & Brioche’s Thalia Ho for her oozy, messy, enviously gooey cookies, and the queen of cookies, Dorie Greenspan herself. It’s more chewy than crispy (because imo chewy > crispy every time), and is based off Dorie’s classic best cookie recipe, with some science-backed twists from Kenji and a sprinkle of aesthetic magic from Thalia. Or at least an attempt at the latter, because sadly the aesthetic part didn’t work out all that well since I didn't have chocolate bars at my disposal. (I did use decent Callebaut nibs though). Ah well, still a real solid recipe otherwise! 

Chocolate Chip Cookies

makes 30-35 cookies

Ingredients

260g all-purpose flour
5g salt
3g baking soda
220g butter, softened at room temperature
150g caster sugar
150g brown sugar
5g espresso/ground coffee beans
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
300g dark chocolate, chips or broken into chunks from a bar, preferably the latter for better aesthetics
150g walnuts/almonds/pecans, finely chopped

Method

1. In a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium-high until fluffy (about a minute or two). Add the caster and brown sugar and continue beating for another minute to incorporate it. Turn the mixer down to medium-low, and add in the vanilla extract and the eggs and continue beating for a minute or so until they all combines.
2. Sift and mix the flour salt, and baking soda, and ground coffee beans together. Then add this to the wet ingredients in the mixer in 3 batches, mixing in between each addition.
3. Finally, add the chocolate and nuts and mix them in on low for about 10 seconds.
4. Chill the dough in the fridge overnight (or up to three days) to develop the gluten and bring out more flavour, Or as Kenji Alt-Lopez puts it: “An overnight rest allows enzymes to break down large carbohydrates, enhancing the caramelisation and browning process the next day to help the cookies develop deeper flavor.”
5. The next day, weigh ~40g of dough per cookie, roll them up into rough balls, and place them onto a lined baking sheet, leaving about 5cm (2 inches) of space in between each dough-ball.
6. Bake the cookies in an oven preheated to 190°C for 12 to 15 minutes, until nicely browned on the edges but still golden and soft in the centre.
7. When the cookies are done, remove from the oven and place them on a wire rack to cool down. 
8. Blissfully relive your childhood memories through them. :D

So I had this granola recipe from awhile back. Despite my claims to use it to “provide my own granola for the family”, I haven’t had the time nor enthusiasm to keep this promise. Sorry fam, but we deplete our granola supply faster than corrupt politicians on our country’s budget; it’s real tough to keep it up.

Sure, I could buy a pack of granola and sneakily refill the granola containers with it, pretending I did all the hard work when I just paid way more than I should’ve on something I could’ve totally made a better version of myself. And just for the sake of sticking with the metaphor here: it’s like how our politicians keep reassuring us that everything is fine and dandy and all of the taxpayers’ money is being invested back into the people, when behind the scenes it’s all being siphoned away to god-knows-where while we’re all stuck with less than we deserve, and oh btw the country (Malaysia) is currently RM675+ billion in debt.

Nope, I’d rather not stoop so low, thank you very much.

(Disclaimer: Okay I don’t actually know much about politics, I just thought it was an interesting passive-aggressive parallel to draw. Heh. :P)

Fortunately enough though, my mom, being the saint that she is, read my granola recipe and tried her hand at making it, and now consistently replenishes the granola supply, ritualistically roasting off two full trays every fortnight! What a legend. Not only does she do that, she riffs on it each time she makes it too. One week it was crispy goji berries in the mix, another it was a gula Melaka + coconut oil variant. And in true motherly fashion, hers always turn out tasting way better than mine. (Amazin’graze granola, watch out.)

Some weeks ago, she made a savoury tempeh + sambal granola, which was so good I had to beg her to do it again just so I could write about it. (Thanks mom.)

If you’re unfamiliar with tempeh, it’s a fermented soybean packed into a cake/terrine-like form, often wrapped with banana leaves. It’s a bit funky and furry, and is apparently real good for your health (as most fermented things are supposed to be). It’s deep-fried form works surprisingly well in a granola, but unless you dig savoury, spicy milk, this granola variant doesn’t really work in a breakfast-milk-in-bowl situation. It’s so damn good as a savoury snack though. A funky, addictive, spicy-till-you-sweat-but-oh-god-I-can't-stop kind of savoury snack. It’s basically a Malaysian trail mix. But spicy. And on crack. GLHF.

- - -

Tempeh & Sambal Granola

Ingredients:

300g granola, home-made or storebought. Refer here for a solid granola recipe
300g tempeh
50g dried sambal, or adjust according to your taste
a handful of curry leaves, ~10g
30g dried coconut flesh/flakes, optional
30g brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1 pinch of black pepper

Method:

1. Cut the tempeh into thin slices (~0.5cm thickness), and deep-fry in a neutral oil at ~180°C, until they turn a shade darker than golden brown. This should take around 3 minutes. Drain and pat dry to remove the excess oil.
2. In the same frying oil, fry the curry leaves for roughly 10 seconds until crispy and fragrant.
3. Put the brown sugar in a large frying pan, then heat on medium until the sugar melts. Add the sambal to the melted sugar and stir fry until fragrant. Then add the granola, deep-fried tempeh, coconut flesh and salt, and stir fry for a minute or two just to get them to come together.
4. Finally, throw in the crispy curry leaves and give it a quick mix.
5. Empty out onto a large tray and cool to room temperature.
6. Snack it like it’s crack.

First off, a disclaimer - this is not a recipe for anchovies, in fact, no anchovies were used/harmed in this recipe at all. Right, you're probably wondering why this post is titled so then. 

Well truth be told, I have too much of a thing for alliteration. It’s a habit I miiight need to kick, but then again, good ones can be so satisfying to read! It's like how some people have a thing for (bad) puns, well I have a thing for alliteration that are so bad they're good... (See my previous posts for possibly incriminating proof.)

The titular reason for the post though is that I did actually accidentally over-cure some mackerel for a salad-dinner I made for my sister a few weeks back. While the recommended time for quick-curing fish is anywhere from 5 minutes - 30 minutes, I left my mackerel fillets in the cure for a good 2 hours before finally remembering them. Though that salty, moisture-sucking piece of fish did make the meal close to inedible (sorry sis), it reminded me so much of the briny, saliva-inducing kick you get from an unexpected bite of anchovy in a Caesar-inspired salad or a proper Italian pizza or pasta (except x1000 the potency in this case).

But in the spirit of the Chef Dan's (& Bourdain's) new Wasted! film, instead of putting this error in judgement behind me and vowing to never overcure fish again, I wondered if this over-salted mistake could be adapted to function in the same capacity as those canned anchovies. So yup, I did go and overcure another batch of mackerel, on purpose this time, just for experimental purposes. I cured it in a 1:1 salt-sugar mixture, added a bit of lemon zest and a spent vanilla pod (just to turn that #wastED factor up a notch), dried it off, and I guess it sorta works!

You can use them like you would anchovies/dried bonito/ikan bilis - in salads, ricebowls and the like to instantly add a sharp, almost-msg-like saltiness you didn't know you were missing (but now definitely want more of). Or blend them into sauces for an instant depth of umami. They're such umami bombs using them almost feels like cheating. Almost. 

So say goodbye to those stinky, over-brined slivers of floppy anchovies packed to death into overly sterile tin cans, and say hello to fresh, home-made, instant uppercuts of umami! (Sorry, just had to end with a terrible alliteration there. :P)

---

"Anchovies"

makes 6 slices of "anchovies"

Ingredients:

3 small mackerel fillets (you can use any other oily fish really!)
60g salt
60g sugar
any aromats you fancy (e.g. lemon or orange zest, dill, cumin seeds etc.)
100ml olive/vegetable oil

Method:

1. Put the salt, sugar, and all other aromatics in a bowl and mix well.
2. Prepare the mackerel fillets (remove pinbones if they're large), then pat them dry. (Here’s a link if you've bought a whole fish and need help filleting them.)
3. Place a third of the curing mix in a shallow tray/container, then carefully position your mackerel fillets on top of the curing mix, skin-side down, avoiding any overlaps. Distribute the remaining cure evenly on top of the fillets. Leave to cure in the refrigerator for 2-3 days.
4. Wash off the excess salt from the mackerel fillets and pat them dry. To help them dry off, you can put them in a dehydrator, or in an oven at a low temperature (~50°C) overnight. 
5. To store, keep in an airtight container/mason jar submerged in olive oil (or any neutral oil works fine too). 

Yup, pandan. That humble little plant sitting snug in my backyard, spiky leaves and all, is now the next big thing in food. Well, according to Nigella at least, along with the countless other food media outlets and writers who’ve just hopped on the pandan hype-train. (I would include myself on that bandwagon, but honestly, I think all South-East Asians were given a free pass on it the day they were born.)

I'm not sure about other SEAsian, but Malaysians are definitely overzealous with our application of pandan, especially when it comes to desserts. That raw green, almost vanillin-like flavour is so ubiquitous in our dessert culture that I can’t name three Malaysian desserts without mentioning one with pandan in it. Think cendol, kuih ketayap, ondeh-ondeh, seri muka, kuih kosui, and 1653218 other kuihs. They all pretty much use the same three ingredients (pandan + coconut milk + gula melaka), just in different ways. While it might seem boring to have so many desserts with the same old flavour profile, I think it's a testament to just how murderously good this flavour combination is! If you haven't had it, you're truly missing out.

Pandan has even become one of the easiest go-to flavours when you’re trying to Malaysian-ise any dish. Don't believe me? Here, give it a try: crème brulee -> pandan crème brulee. (Wow, much Malaysian.) Here’s another one: roast chicken -> pandan roast chicken. (Wew bro, u orang Malaysia ke?) Okay you get the idea. Heck, we use pandan so much that it’s even found in our toilets. Pandan-scented reed sticks / air freshener / mosquito repellent, anyone?

I gotta admit though, Nigella’s recent prediction has got me feeling all kinds of weird. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE pandan, but it's just a bit rare to have such a humble Malaysian ingredient at the center of the world food media’s attention. After all, our cuisine has always been pretty niche on the world's stage.

I'm also dreading the potential cultural (mis)appropriation that might happen, because as much as I love pandan, nothing can convince me to try a frankensteinian pandan-infused-unicorn-frappucino-esque drink/food item that will surely be created somewhere in the world by some wacky, hypetrain-chasing dude. On the flipside however, I'm pretty curious to see and learn about all the novel ways in which other cultures will try and use pandan to their foods! So yeah, a pretty mixed bag of feelings there. Ah well, time will tell.

- - -

For now, (and I'm not jumping on the bandwagon at all here :P), here’s a short recipe on a traditional Malaysian breakfast staple - pandan kaya, a.k.a. Malaysian-coconut-milk-plus-egg-custard-sauce-jam-spread-thing. It has a texture akin to a thick, gloopy English custard, but instead of having it with pudding, we have it on toast for breakfast. It’s mouth-coatingly rich, and just as you start to think it might be too sweet, the savoury tang of the coconut milk comes through and makes you wanna down all of the kaya like you would a tub of Nutella .

I also hacked this recipe a bit by blending the pandan into the mix right at the beginning just to simplify things and give you that nice green hue! (This is sure to elicit may tut-tuts from all the kaya-making mak ciks out there though, so don't let them in on this, heh.)

- - -

Pandan Kaya

Ingredients:

3 eggs
2 egg yolk
200g coconut milk
4 pandan leaves (or 5-10g of pandan extract)
150g fine caster sugar
2g salt
 

Method:

1. Blend the pandan leaves with the eggs, egg yolk, and coconut milk until smooth. Then, sift the mixture to remove those fibrous strands of pandan. If you're using pandan extract, ignore this step and just add the extract to the eggs and coconut milk and stir well.
2. Prepare a bain marie/water bath on medium heat (~80°C), pour the liquid into a bowl on the bain marie, and add the sugar and salt.
3. Now here’s where your patience will be tested. With a spatula, stir the mixture until it turns thick and custardy. This will take around 30 minutes, if not longer. At first, it may not look like much is happening, but keep stirring and scraping the bottom and sides of the bowl to make sure the egg doesn’t curdle, I promise you it'll thicken up with time!
4. When your kaya reaches a custard-like consistency, remove from the bain marie and let cool. If there are large lumps in the kaya, you can pass it through a sieve and give it a whisk, which should hopefully smoothen it out! If that doesn't work, you can blend it (add some water if it's too thick to blend, and then cook it further to get to the desired consistency).
5. Have on toast with a thick wad of butter for a truly Malaysian breakfast!