Sambal Udang Kering – Simple but Back Breaking!

I loved this dish as a kid but I didn’t get to eat it often. In fact, I don’t even eat it often nowadays. What put me off from eating and cooking it? I don’t really have an answer.

Photo by Mark Ong

Suffice to say, Sambal Udang Kering or Hae Bee Hiam has always been one of those dishes in my “out of sight, out of mind” list. Still, it is a well-loved dish that appears, in some form, in the cuisine of the Malays, Peranakans, and Chinese. Each ethnicity -- even each household -- had its own version.

The ingredients are simple; what is needed in buckets is patience and tolerance of heat, because you need to stir-fry the rempah for at least an hour! For those in the mood to indulge, you can even drop in a few lard crisps before eating. Best of all, Sambal Udang Kering tastes delicious even when it is eaten simply, like sprinkled over a bowl of rice or on buttered bread.

This is how I cook my version of it …

Hae Bee Hiam or Sambal Udang Kering

Peanut oil                    ½ cup

Sugar                           3 tbsp

Shallots                       300 g, chopped

Red chillies                  300 g, chopped

Dried shrimps             200 g, minced

Garlic                           500 g, finely chopped

Salted fish                    25 g, deep-fried and crushed (optional)

Pork crisps                  25 g (optional)

Salt                              1 tsp

Rempah (ground into paste)

Dried chillies               25 g, soaked in warm water for 30 minutes and drained

Belachan                      25 g, toasted

Lemongrass                2 stalks, white part only and bashed

Candlenut                    50 g

Hae bee hiam is so versatile that it makes a
great condiment for pan-fried radish cake.

Method:

1.    Heat oil in medium heat. Sweat sugar, shallots, chillies and rempah for 20 minutes.

2.    Add dried shrimps and garlic. Continue to sauté the mixture for another 8 minutes.

3.    Add salted fish and pork crisps (optional). Season with salt.

4.    Continue to fry until mixture is dried out.

5.    Let it cool and store in a bottle.

Sin Huat Eating House - A Meal That Left Me Crabby

Do I trust a foreign food personality to tell me what’s good on our local streets? Apparently not! Sin Huat Eating House won Mr. Anthony Bourdain’s heart and he sang praises (loads of it) on his TV series.

I had heard things about this restaurant. Its owner Chef Danny was known as the Food Nazi of Singapore and diners gladly paid through their noses for his superb, fresh seafood. You didn’t order your meals, so much as have the orders dictated to you by the chef, who would then cook your meal personally. And you wouldn’t know the size of your portion, or its price until the receipt arrived.

Because of this, I took a long time to convince myself -- and save enough money -- to have a first-hand encounter with this much talked about chef.

The restaurant was pretty quiet on the day of my visit, save for two tables of eight and five, and ours. One of my eating companions was a regular and the chef knew him well. Chef Danny offered a rather limited menu, and it seemed 90% of his dishes were de-rigueur with the regulars. We were no different.

Chef Danny delivers his food packed full of very strong flavours, especially garlic. A Singapore celebrity chef once told me, “If I boost my stock and flavours to the maximum, customers would be so overwhelmed that few would be able to tell the difference between good and mediocre cooking”. Chef Danny seems to subscribe to this philosophy.

A case in point was the Steamed Frog’s Legs with Essence of Chicken. Eight bottles of Chicken Essence were poured into a plate of eight perfectly steamed frogs, with garlic. With such an avalanche of robust chicken flavour, little culinary skill was needed for the dish to pack a wallop.

There were other instances. The dish of steamed scallops was overdone but the heavy bath of bean paste sauce was enough to mask its faults, along with much of the intrinsic flavour of the scallop. A similar sauce was used on the fried/braised crayfish. Again, I had to rely largely on my sight to discern what meat I was eating.

A few dishes stood out though. The stir-fried kai lan – usually a simple, supporting dish -- was delicious. It had the right amount of garlic, and the vegetable was crisp and flavoursome. Though it wasn’t cheap, I would gladly pay for it. On the other hand, the MOST cut-throat dish of the evening was the blanched dog conch or simply gong gong to the locals, served with a very tasty dip that was most likely a concoction of oyster sauce, garlic, chilli and buckets of processed flavouring. At $25 per kg, the owner of this restaurant could easily have bought a bungalow in a prime district in no time – if he hasn’t already done so.

The steamed squid was well executed and it was my 2^nd favourite dish of the evening. Again the garlic was slightly heavy handed. To his credit, Chef Danny’s handling of the steaming times for the seafood in most of his dishes was near impeccable. However, his main seafood ingredients lacked the flavor of what they were -- they didn't stand out but were buried under his overly strong sauces and dips.  I suspect this is Chef Danny’s trick: to mask and/or distract from his inability to balance his spices and sauces with finesse.

The final dish of braised crab mee hoon was my main purpose for coming to this restaurant; after all this dish made Chef Danny famous in this infamous red-light district. It consisted of two medium crabs and a handful of mee hoon. The mee hoon was very tasty, but lacked the flavour that mattered the most – that of the crab itself. How come? I wondered. Crab imparts a distinctly robust and sweet flavour; and two crabs’ worth of it would certainly have made its presence felt in the dish. Was it buried under heavy MSG or chicken flavouring? I wasn’t sure. But it led to my companions and I consuming ¼ of our national water reserves during the meal and after we got home that night.

Here is my concluding shot: when a foreign food personality or two visits some eatery in Singapore and delivers an encomium, we fall for it hook, line and sinker. Are we so insecure in our own judgments? After all, we, of all people, should know our own food better than anyone. This thought came to me strongly on this occasion. To whip up a tasty dish is not difficult: just load it with MSG and off-the-shelf broths. It's the mastery of precise cooking times that, in my opinion, is Chef Danny's ONLY true achievement. The textures were unfailingly right -- but where were the delicate flavors of seafood? I couldn't detect any of it in all the dishes that I ate. And to me, that's a major letdown.

P.S. I doubted the eight of us could have eaten 3 kg of dog conchs and 3 kg of scallops; but that was what the receipt said.

Sin Huat Seafood Restaurant

659/661 Geylang Road

Singapore

Telephone: 6744 9755

Make a Date

For us Chinese, Chinese New Year was something to anticipate and look forward to. The preparations would commence months before the actual festival, which usually falls in January or February. Worn out furniture would be replaced, new bed linens and curtains procured, and walls would receive a fresh coat of paint.

As kids, we would be pampered with new clothes and a haircut. There was another activity that I was especially eager to participate in. In those days, most festive snacks were prepared by family, friends, or neighbours. The cooks and their assistants would gather at a common area; ingredients would be laid out and duties assigned. Every participant seemed to know his or her role in some unspoken way.

Some peeled, others sliced, and the more experienced would cook. There were no recipes and no instructions, yet everyone knew what to do. The novices would help in the more menial tasks, and watch the others to study the steps of preparation and cooking.

Festive snacks were not taken lightly. Each snack had its own auspicious significance and even the sequence of cooking mattered. This particular snack is known as “Smiling Dates” or  笑口枣. Traditionally, dough was rolled into a ball and smothered in sesame seeds. During deep-frying, the ball would burst open and resemble a smiling face.

It was believed that this snack would bring happiness and smiles to the family for the next 12 months!

Smiling Dates (笑口枣)

Sugar                                       60 g

Water                                      20 g

Cake flour                               180 g

Custard powder                     10 g

Baking soda                            3 g

Bicarbonate of soda                ¼ tsp

Salt                                          ¼ tsp

Egg yolk                                 40 

Butter                                      30 g, room temperature

White sesame                         ½ cup

Method:

1.    Melt sugar in water. Set aside and let it cool.

2.    Mix flour, custard powder, baking soda, bicarbonate of soda and salt, sieve well.

3.    Mix all ingredients, except white sesame, and form a dough. Cover and let it rest for 30 minutes.

4.    Roll dough into a long rod. Cut into small pieces.

Take a small piece and roll it into a ball. Dip in water and roll the ball onto the sesame seeds.

Hainanese Pork Chops As I Remember It

Personally, I feel that one of the greatest inventions by the Singapore Hainanese chefs is Hainanese Pork Chops. From the European households whom most of the chefs worked for, they learnt how to use foreign sauces such as HP sauce, Lea & Perrins sauce, and the wonders of roux as thickener in making sauces.

While the British were used to apple sauce and mustard as accompaniments to their pork chops, the Hainanese substituted these with HP sauce and Lea & Perrins, as they agreed better with their taste buds.

Over the years, Hainanese pork chops would undergo further changes to make it even more appealing to the Chinese rather than the Caucasians. That included the use of ketchup as the key ingredient in the sauce. And bread crumbs or Jacob’s crumbs – one of the original ingredients – also disappeared from the recipe in most restaurants.

The recipe I’m trying to replicate here is much closer to the version I was brought up on in the 60s, the version that was served at most coffee houses and Hainanese restaurants.

Hainanese Pork Chops

Pork chop                                           6 slices, about ¾ cm thick each

Flour                                                    2 cups

Egg                                                      2, lightly beaten

Bread crumbs/ Jacob’s crumbs            2 cups

Oil                                                       3 cups

Potato                                                  2, cut into chunks

Mixed vegetables                                1 cup

Marinade:

Oyster sauce                                       1 tbsp

HP sauce                                             ½ tsp

Pepper                                                 ¼ tsp

Corn flour                                           1 tsp

Sauce:

Butter                                                   3 tbsp

AP flour                                               3 tbsp

HP sauce                                             4 tbp

Lea & Perrins                                       3 tbsp

Meat stock                                           ¼ cup

Pepper                                                 a dash

Salt                                                      ¼ tsp

Sugar                                                   2 tbsp

Method:

1.    Use a heavy mallet to break up the muscle fibers of the pork chops.

2.    Rub marinade into the pork and chill for at least 30 mins.

3.    Dust pork chops with flour, soak the meat thoroughly with egg mixture, dust with bread crumbs. Put it aside to rest for 5 minutes. This step will prevent excessive crumbs from falling off the meat during deep frying.

4.    Deep fry pork chops until both sides turn golden brown. Drain off the oil and slice into ½ cm thick. Place it on the serving plate.

5.    Boil potato until it is cooked. Drain and shake off the water completely. This step will create uneven surfaces on the potato, which will give the chips extra crisp. Deep fry the potato chips until golden brown. Drain and transfer to the serving plate.

6.    Pour sauce generously over the pork chops and serve immediately.

Sauce:

1.    Melt butter over medium heat. Saute mixed vegetables for 1 min.

2.    Add flour and cook for another 1 to 2 mins to create a roux.

3.    Add the rest of the sauce ingredients gradually and whisk until the sauce thickens.

4.    The sauce should not be too thick. If it is too thickened, add some stock to dilute it. Adjust the taste with salt and sugar.

5.    Set aside and keep warm.