Best of 2011

Ingredients of the year: corn tortillas and kalamansi limes

Tacos have made it into the bi-weekly dinner repertoire. Fillings vary: there has occasionally been spiced-up leftover brisket or shoulder of lamb, more often some beans. A cabbage salad is a new and popular addition to the table. Whatever the individual components, this is always fun to eat, its quality underpinned by proper tacos (ordinarily from here, though there are some being made in Brixton now too).

Amongst the many foolish things that the European Commission has done is to forbid the importation of these limes, far more intense and aromatic than anything I’ve come across. Bottled concentrates bring back at least some memory of drinking sweet-sour lime sodas across Malaysia, but I remain on the lookout for contraband.

Method: curing

When I lived in France, I would have no more made confit de canard from scratch than I would have baked my own croissants. But measured by an input-output ratio, this delivers an astonishing amount for very little effort: one pan, about 15 minutes of active time and a bonus jar of duck fat at the end.

Most exciting Brixton opening: Lab G

Our local maestro di gelato is a generous soul, a creative genius and a perfectionist, particularly when it comes to his exceptional pistachio and salted caramel flavours. This is the place we take people when we want them to appreciate just how astonishing the Brixton food scene is.

Best meal (London): Pied á Terre

I was lucky enough to eat at this Michelin 2-star twice in 2011. The food was beautiful to look at, and the kitchen is creative while still turning out plates that are hugely enjoyable to eat. The service was a surprise too: well-informed, generous and far from starchy. At lunchtime, it's not even shockingly expensive.

Best meal (everywhere else): Tek Sen

One of the few disappointing moments of our trip to Penang was finding this restaurant closed (some kind of temple festival) when we tried to make a return visit. This was revelatory food: astonishingly fresh yet amazingly complex in flavour. If there’s a single reason why we’re cooking and eating so much more Asian food now, it must lie in the effort to recapture what was on those plates.

Most-used cookbook: Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy

We had this out from the library on and off for the last 6 months; our permanent copy should be arriving in time for the beginning of Hanukkah. It’s yielded crispy, spicy chickpeas which are perfect with a G&T, our first proper dhal and introduced us to curry leaves. But the biggest game changer has been making our own chapattis, far simpler and tastier than I would have imagined possible.

Most enjoyable food shop: A & C Co Continental Grocers

I’m spending more time in the local Asian grocery these days, and I still make a trip to Borough Market most weekends. But this is the place that I stop into nearly 6 days a week, whether for some olives or nuts to start off dinner, to top-up store cupboard basics or for the things that no one else sells locally, like quinces or fresh bay leaves. These are the people who’ve held onto my extra keys, make me laugh at the end of a rotten day and are eager to have taste me the new cheese that’s just come in. I don’t think most people have a shop like this; I’m very lucky that I do.

Best experiment: growing tomatoes

Flowers and shrubbery may still hold very limited interest, but I’m now beginning to understand why people like to garden. I’m not sure that in the midst of the root rot saga of August and September, or when I was hauling home 40 litres of potting soil on the bus, that I wholly appreciated how satisfying it could be to grow my own food. But it gave me occasion to talk to my neighbours, and was a far better use of time than more Internet surfing. And I learned that even basic cherry tomatoes taste great when picked as the table is being set for dinner.

Eating Penang

Penang (used to refer both to the island of the northwest coast of Malaysia and its capital), or George Town, as it is also known, is hot, crowded and almost disorienting in its concentration of sights, smells and sounds.

There are dozens of places of worship, ranging from the most modest sidewalk shrine to gilded temple complexes and spanning the city’s three major faiths: Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam (the last with separate Indian and Malay strands). Pedicab drivers tout for business, and there are far too many mopeds and motorcycles. The architecture encompasses British colonial relics, like the E&O Hotel and St George’s Church, touches of Art Deco and mid-century modern, and street after street of brightly-coloured, closely-packed shophouses (a building style popular across much of Southeast Asia, these were built in the nineteenth century as combined commercial and residential spaces.) The streets smell of joss sticks and cooking food. Much of the city looks a bit tumble-down and in need of a coat of paint; yet more and more buildings are being beautifully and painstakingly restored as shops, small hotels or homes.

Photographers, those with a yen for a history, or an interest in religious practices, all find plenty to satisfy in Penang. As for those who really like to eat: the quality, variety and sheer scale of what’s on offer is simply astonishing. It says something about how a city chooses to present itself to the world that maps of locations, days and times where several dozen iconic dishes can be eaten are prominently displayed at the airport. And even in a city which is changing rapidly, it’s striking that many of the best and most popular eating venues are ones which have survived the decades virtually unaltered.

With only three days available for our visit, we were almost always full but very rarely disappointed. To recount even the highlights is still a daunting task. A few stand-outs, in no particular order:

Steamed pomfret “Teo chew style” at Tek Sen, an open-fronted Chinatown cafe which has been serving Peranakan (also known as Nyonya or Straits Chinese, after the Chinese immigrants who married local women) dishes for the last 45 years. The mixture of pieces of tomato, black mushrooms, sour plums and some other unidentifiable items yielded a brothy sauce that was clean, sharp and phenomenally complex. The only place with a menu, much less an English-language one, the recent facelift has, according to those in the know, not changed the quality of food.

Mee goreng at Shahul Hamid. By far the most popular dish served in the rather dingy food court next to the seaside esplanade and eighteenth century Fort Cornwallis, the fried noodles cooked up by the stall’s owner are made to his father’s World War II-era recipe. My tin plate came piled with work-charred egg noodles, bits of peanuts, chives and squid fried with lots of chilli paste. In what was probably a quiet 20 minutes, no fewer than 2 dozen portions were cooked to order.

Assam laksa (sour noodle soup) at an unnamed cafe near the city’s business district. The broth balanced chilli heat with a strong punch tamarind, the fish was similar to sardines, meaty with a shredded texture, and the entirety was lifted with small chunks of sweet, acidic pineapple and fresh mint leaves. We could have easily finished several more of these small, orange bowls.

Breakfast in Malaysia

I suppose it’s possible that most Malaysians actually just grab a quick bowl of cereal, or a piece of toast, before heading out for the day. But I’d much prefer to think that the people I saw on the street or in simple coffee shops, filling up on an astonishing variety of rice, noodles, flat breads and more, are indeed the majority.

To start, a beverage. While it’s possible to get almost any fruit freshly-squeezed from dedicated street-side vendors, coffee and tea tend to be the more common accompaniments. The former can be iced or hot, and is usually topped off with sweetened condensed milk. The latter can be made with lemon and sugar syrup, particularly good iced, or turned into a frothy, latte-like beverage—teh tarik—by adding the condensed milk, then pouring the mixture between two glasses.

As for the main dish, the best food purveyors are highly specialised, often focusing on a single dish or—at most—a certain ethnic subset of dishes. It will therefore be necessary to choose at least a first course. On the more culturally mixed western coast, a masala dosa, served up in a Tamil-owned cafe, is a good starting point. These are invariably made to order on a flat grill, stuffed with mustard seed, chilli and onion-laced crushed potatoes and served with tomato, coriander and coconut relishes. The only decisions to be made are whether to spoon a thick, dhal-like sauce over the top and if the standard pancake, already quite thin and crispy, should be swapped out for one which is even lacier around the edges. If you like what you’ve been given, fold down the banana leaf cum serving plate towards you before leaving.

Next, some rice, perhaps the iconic Malaysian breakfast dish of nasi lemak. You may have a choice between fried chicken (ayam goreng) and chicken in red sauce (masak merah); the latter gives more sauce to mix with the coconut rice, anchovies and peanuts. And while boiled (and usually slightly over-boiled) eggs are the norm, any place with a fried egg option is likely to be making up a good plate of nasi lemak. Another option, harder to find but well worth seeking out, is the Indian Muslim nasi kandar, a mini-buffet of meat curries and vegetables, served with plain rice. Think it’s too heavy to be eating at this hour? Consider again. It won’t get cooler until well into the evening, and many of the best nasi kandar stalls will run out by mid-morning.

To finish, a roti canai. Find a vendor with a busy griddle, and watch the flatbreads being made in front of you. For sauce, the thin lentil curry tends to get my nod over the chicken gravy, but look at what the locals are eating and choose accordingly. Wait until it’s cool enough to not burn your (right) hand, but no longer. Like the pancakes you might make at home, these don’t improve over time.

A few venues to try, should you find yourself in George Town (the capital of Penang state), courtesy of the always-reliable Robyn Eckhardt.

Veloo Vilas

Great dosai at 22 King Street, Little India

Toon Leong

The brothers serving up the nasi kandar at the front of this Chinese-owned coffee shop on the corner of Jalan Transfer and Jalan Argyll are carrying on the business started by their grandfather, an immigrant from southern India. The okra and beef are both superb, and the coffee, served up by unusually crotchety older man, is very good here too.

In London, Bonda Cafe, a halal joint near Paddington kept to high standards and low prices by being in the basement of a Malaysian student residence, opens at 8:30 on weekends to serve up nasi lemak and roti canai.

Coconut

In Malaysia, Java and Bali, coconut comes second only to rice in its ubiquity and centrality to both sweet and savoury food. Even the goats—we came across this one near a beach in Terrangganu, eyeing up a coconut shake—seem to like it.

Young, green coconuts—often described as jelly coconuts—are simply sawed open, the watery, gently sweet liquid drunk through a straw. In the process of maturation, the flesh shifts from being gelatinous and quite bland to a meaty, sweet richness. The flesh can then be turned into milk (made by grating the flesh either on a board of nails or with a threshing-like machine, then pressing it, adding warm water and repeating) or oil (a more involved process which requires long, gentle cooking of the milk, then spooning off and refining the liquid fat which rises to the top), or simply grated, to be used as is, toasted or dry-fried.

I can’t say that the oil was particularly distinctive as a cooking fat, though the less processed oil (used in a particularly tasty meal served, of all places, at a “lifestyle cafe” in the Kuala Lumpur airport’s Low Cost Terminal), did have a certain clean sweetness . The milk, however, drew together all sorts of complex tastes and textures—as coconut rice (nasi lemak),anchoring and giving its name to a popular Malay breakfast spread of chicken curry, fried peanuts, crisp anchovy-like fish, hard-boiled egg, cucumber and a spicy, tomato-based sauce (sambal); in tempering the pungent sourness of curried fish soup (Nyonya laksa, also sometimes known as curry laksa or laksa lemak); and as a relatively neutral medium to float sweet noodles, crushed ice, syrups and gelatinous shapes in cendol and ice kacang.

Coconut also features prominently in desserts that more closely resembled their European counterparts. The best we came across were moreish tarts from Leong Chee Kee, a small bakery owned by the same family for two generations. Justifiably popular, the tarts’ double-crusted pastry are impossibly flaky, the coconut flavour intense, and the overall result not too sweet. Impressively tinged green with pandan leaf, but perhaps less exciting in the mouth, were the thin crepe-like pancakes sold across Bali, filled with a palm sugar caramel and fresh coconut flakes.

A new discovery in Indonesia was the abundant use of grated coconut, sometimes fresh, other times toasted, in cooked vegetable salads. These invariably contained long green beans, chilli, lime, sugar, often also spinach or water spinach and young, just-sprouted mung beans, and were sold under the name of urap sayur (coconut vegetables).

Back in London, I found a Madhur Jaffrey recipe for something named Gudangan which seemed a simpler approximation of what I had eaten. (Some versions also use a fresh spice paste.) Without the energy to bash open the fresh coconuts which are abundant at local Caribbean shops, I settled for rehydrating unsweetened, desiccated coconut. And though Jaffrey’s recipe also called for cauliflower and mung bean sprouts, I stuck to the green beans already in the fridge.

The result was, even without the banana leaf as serving plate, plastic stool and relentless heat, highly enjoyable. And with only six ingredients, it stands a better chance than other vacation favourites of making it onto our table on a regular basis.

Green bean salad with coconut and chili dressing

Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian

Serves 2 amply

Total time: 75 minutes; Active time: 15 minutes

I like this slightly warm or at room temperature, but it can also be prepared a bit in advance and chilled.

1 fresh red chili

1 garlic clove

2-3 tsp lime juice

Scant 4 tbsp unsweetened, desiccated coconut

1 tsp palm sugar (use dark brown sugar or jaggery if this is unavailable)

2 large handfuls of green beans (should be about 1 package or farmers’ market container)

Rehydrate coconut in a bowl with just over 3 tbsp hot water. It should take from 45 minutes to one hour to fully absorb the liquid and become soft.

While the coconut is rehydrating, chop the chilli finely (removing seeds if desired). Mince the garlic. Add both to a mixing bowl and squeeze over lime juice. Add palm sugar. (If it’s hard to get out of the container, try microwaving it for 5-10 seconds or using a spoon dipped in boiling water.) Mix to combine.

Cut beans into 1 ½ inch lengths. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and add beans. Cook until just tender—approximately 4 minutes. Drain in cold water to arrest cooking and leave to cool.

Add the coconut to the dressing and mix through. Add the beans and combine. Taste for balance, adding salt and pepper and adjusting the acidity and sweetness.

Here and there

Cookbooks

I’ve recently become a member of the local public library. I did so mostly to support the reading demands presented by my four hour a day commute. (The recent haul has included some Philip Roth, Paul Auster and lots of mystery novels.) But it turns out that the cookbook section is surprisingly extensive. This week we’ve been perusing Thomasina Miers’ Mexican Food Made Simple and Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy. As well as both having the now-requisite artfully simple photos, they share a common goal of demystifying what are perceived as complicated cuisines (and in the case of Miers’, introducing it to a UK audience). While there are a few compromises made on ingredients (tomatillos, for example, don’t figure prominently as they’re very difficult to find in the UK) and processes are simplified, the food, on early evidence, doesn’t taste dumbed-down at all.

Beer

Our household doesn’t get through a lot of beer. But we’ve tried a few English ales lately which have generated the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for stinky red wines from the south of France. The most memorable was a golden ale from a microbrewery near the Mendip hills in Somerset. It was fruity, bright and the perfect complement to a far better-than-average ploughman’s lunch: bread from our favourite local supplier, Westcombe Cheddar from Neal’s Yard and pumpkin chutney. Cheddar Ales aren’t really sold outside the local area, but we liked this enough that we’re considering using some our wine storage space to house a few dozen bottles. (Closer to hand, the St. Austell’s Cornish IPA sold by Marks & Spencer has also proved very enjoyable.)

Sorrel

It hasn’t been growing as out of control as I might like, but there’s still been enough to put into scrambled eggs and herby potato salads and to mix with chopped mint and soft cheese for a tasty pre-dinner spread, perfect on thin slices of toast.

Blogs

In anticipation of July’s trip to Malaysia and Indonesia, I’ve been searching for good information on where and what I should be eating. Eating Asia has been a great discovery. Authored by a professional food writer who’s spent the last 20+ years living in Southeast Asia, it features ingredients, street food and markets from the China to Sulawesi and everywhere in between, shot beautifully and explained with a knowledgeable but light touch. This will be my guide to the best fried chicken in Yogyakarta, central Java, and to what can’t be missed in one of the region’s best eating cities, Penang (Georgetown).