Old Cucumber Soup is Cool!

It’s no secret that most Cantonese love soup. In fact, the story is told of the exodus of Hong Kongers to other countries just before the handover to China in 1997. Entire families would leave but often the men would stay behind in Hong Kong to continue their business or career. This created a market niche for shops to spring up selling different types of soups to these gentlemen who were deprived of home cooked food.

In my home, we grew up with the custom of having a bowl of soup before family dinner. The ingredients that went into making this soup often cost a third or more of the entire meal budget. Depending on the type of soup, the bulk of the purchase was for pork ribs and chicken. Quite commonly we would put one whole chicken in the soup along with other Chinese herbs or vegetables.

There were soups for different seasons, as we believed soup helped to balance yin and yang in the body. When the summer got hot, we would opt for vegetable soups containing cucumber, winter melon, bitter gourd, etc. And as the weather cooled, Chinese herbs or ‘heaty’ meat such as mutton would used to warm the body.

This is one of my favourite soups for Singapore, where the thermometer seldom dips below 30 degrees Celsius for much of the year. Old cucumber is believed to help cool the body. Other ingredients are added to complement the cucumber; in my family that would usually be dried seafood such as octopus, scallop and oyster, or in this instance, dried duck gizzard. To give the soup fuller body, mix in pork ribs and chicken meat. One tip to note is to always place the cucumber into the pot when the water is still cold and not when it starts to boil, or the soup would have a slightly sour taste.

Old Cucumber Soup

Old cucumber             500 g

Water                          2 litres

Pork ribs                     300 g

Chicken feet                300 g

Red dates                     5

Dried octopus             1

Dried gizzard               2 (or otherwise 10 dried oysters)

Method:

1.    Put cucumber in cold water, turn on the heat and boil.

2.    Add the rest of the ingredients and boil at full flame for 10 minutes.

3.    Simmer for another 2 hours.

4.    Season with salt and a dash of soy sauce.

Fried Oat Prawns---A Remarkable Combination

This was a dish I was not familiar with growing up. It has become a popular dish in seafood restaurants along with other new variations of cooking prawns, such as butter, black pepper, kam heong and others in recent years.

Although its origin is hard to trace, it has strong connections to our colonial past. In fact, I remember having oats for breakfast when I lived with my grandparents. The aroma of oats was unmistakable; it permeated the whole house and was served in two versions: sweet or savoury, but always with an egg in it.

Cooking this dish was a breeze except in the preparation of the egg shreds---that took some practice. The control of the butter temperature was crucial: too hot and it becomes an omelette instantly; and if the butter is too cold, it turns into a sunny-side up without the yolk!

And, if you like a spicy touch, add some minced chilli together with the garlic and oats.

Happy cooking!

Fried Oat Prawns

Prawns                        500 g, trimmed and slit back

Oil                               2 cups

Egg yolks                   4, beat thoroughly

Evaporated milk         1 tbsp

Unsalted butter          5 tbsp

Garlic                           2 tbsp, minced

Oats                            3 tbsp

Seasoning:

Salt                             ½ tsp

Sugar                          ½ tsp

Method:

1.    Heat oil and deep fry prawns until ¾ cooked. Drain thoroughly. Set aside.

2.    Mix egg yolks and evaporated milk well.

3.    Heat butter in low heat. Pour egg mixture into the butter and stir clockwise slowly until the butter is heated and the mixture begins to form fine shreds.

4.    Add oats and garlic and continue to cook for 30 seconds.

5.    Add prawns and seasoning, continue to stir until the prawns are cooked.

6.    Drain the prawns and egg shreds thoroughly, and dish.

Tong Heng - A Sweet Success Story

Success didn’t strike overnight, far from it. This one took patience, grit, and cool business sense.

Tong Heng had its beginnings on Keppel Road in the 1920s, where its founder was one among many who peddled drinks, snacks, and biscuits to shipyard and other blue-collar workers. By 1932 he had saved enough to open a restaurant on Smith Street in Chinatown, selling dim sum. Dim sum was popular food, but competition was again rough; so he streamlined his “business direction” and focused on the bestsellers. Thus began the Tong Heng egg tart’s road to food stardom.

The business today is into its third generation; headed by three sisters, Constance, Rebecca, and Cynthia Fong. And, like many family businesses, it’s managed in a decidedly non-corporate style. Decisions are made around the family table; and since early recipes were not properly documented, the sisters had to resort to research, and rounds of test cooking, to improve, and, finally perfect, the family recipes.

But they almost didn’t get to do it: their father didn’t want them involved in the business initially. But then, community work bogged him down, and an accident he suffered affected his running of the business.

The sisters eventually took over, and their sheer hard work shows in the many popular products sold over Tong Heng counters. Foods sold in their father’s day today appear in new reinventions; and the sisters created and launched the brand’s highly successful range of moon cakes in the late 1970s. They proudly point out that their colored snow-skin moon cakes were the first of their kind in Singapore, and featured four flavors: durian (yellow-skinned), strawberry (pink), vanilla (white), and pandan (green).

Today, with a staff of more than ten in the kitchen, and two retail outlets, the company needs to produce thousands of their signature egg and coconut tarts and other snacks, each day. Like the proud owners that they are, the three women boast of their in-house-made ingredients, such as the red bean and lotus paste fillings, the kayas, and dough.

Tong Heng is today an instantly recognizable name; and, famed egg tart aside, its other bestsellers include the coconut tart, char siew puff, and vegetarian coin-biscuit.  They have even introduced Hong Kong-style desserts at their shops.

Tong Heng

285 South Bridge Road

Singapore 058833

Tel:   6223 3649, 6223 0398

Chilli Crab---My First Kill!

I hardly ever cook crab at home, though I love eating them. That’s because I could never muster the guts to slaughter them! Yes, I am a wimp when it comes to personally ending the life of one of God’s creatures for the cooking pot…

In Singapore, when we talk about crab, what’s on everybody’s mind is almost always Chilli Crab.

I think this dish’s place in the ‘national cuisine’ of Singapore is richly deserved. Though there are many various claimants to the original birthplace of Chilli Crab, for sheer satiating deliciousness, no country does it the way we do.

However, having eaten Chilli Crab since I was a boy, I can say too, that I’ve borne witness to the gradual changes in the dish, especially in flavor and the type of crab used. It began as a simple affair---just local mud crabs---but over the years has come to embrace a richer harvest, including the Sri Lankan crab, Alaskan crab, and snow crab of today. The gravy has also evolved: it is sweeter, and often much less spicy, than I remember it.

In the old days, people ate Chilli Crab sometimes with rice, but more often with the local version of the baguette known as ‘French loaf’. And nothing tasted better than dipping chunks of French loaf into the thick gravy. These days the French loaf is all but forgotten, replaced instead by the steamed or fried Chinese bun called ‘man tou’.

I never like my Chilli Crab with the sweeter and finer textured man tou, and sorely miss the simple French loaf, with its rough thick crust heavily soaked and dripping with spicy crab gravy!

Ideal choices for the crab to be used are Sri
Lankan and Indonesian, whose meat is firmer.

Recently, I took the bold step of slaughtering a crab. Where an experienced cook would have made light work of it in a minute or less, I took more than twenty, with much of it spent simply drumming up the courage!

I was trying to replicate the Chilli Crab I used to enjoy at home back in the 60s. To achieve this, I made my own chilli paste instead of relying on the off-the-rack versions available today---which would have given me flavors different from those of my childhood. I also skipped the step where you quick-deep-fried the crab, since I preferred my crabmeat succulent, soft and juicy, and the skipped process would have left a light crust on the meat. Therefore, enjoy!

Chilli Crab

Oil                   1½ tbsp

Onion              ½, sliced thickly

Red chilli         2, sliced thickly

Chilli paste      2 tbsp

Mud crab         1 kg, cleaned and chopped and smashed lightly

Wine               2 tbsp

Stock               1 cup

Tomato           2, quartered

Salt                  ½ tsp

Sugar               1 tsp

Egg                  2, lightly beaten

Corn flour       1 tbsp, diluted with 1 tbsp of water

Coriander        1 tbsp, sliced

Spring onion   1 tbsp, sliced

Chilli paste:

Oil                   8 tbsp

Shallots           130 g, chopped

Garlic               80 g, chopped

Candle nuts     60 g, chopped

Belachan          50 g, mashed

Chilli paste      250 g

Salt                  ½ tsp

Sugar               2 tbsp

Method:

1.    Fry onion and chilli over low flame until the onion turns soft. This will caramelize the onion.

2.    Increase the flame to the maximum, add chilli paste and fry for 30 seconds before adding the crab. Quick-stir for 1 minute. Add wine around the circumference of the wok. This process helps to evaporate all alcohol content. Continue to stir-fry for another 1 minute.

3.    Add stock, tomato, and cover the wok with a lid. Let the stock boil for 5 minutes, without opening the lid.

4.    Remove lid, season the mixture with salt and sugar. Lower the flame and add beaten egg and stir thoroughly.

5.    Thicken the sauce with corn starch.

6.    Garnish the dish with coriander and spring onion and serve immediately.

7.    After eating the crab, it is a practice to finish the sauce by dipping baguette in it.

Chilli paste:

1.     Saute shallots with oil until light golden brown, add garlic and belachan and continue to fry until all ingredients are golden brown.

2.     Add candle nuts and chilli paste and cook until oil surfaces. If the mixture turns dry or begins to burn during the process, add a tbsp of water during the frying.

3.     Season with salt and sugar. The cooked chilli paste can be kept for 2 weeks refrigerated.

Note: Crab could be deep-fried in hot oil for 30 seconds, and drained before cooking. This will form a very light crust on the meat. But I prefer to skip this step as I like the crabmeat smooth and soaked in the gravy thoroughly.

Mixed Vegetable Stew – A Lesson in Giving

When I was growing up, we had a part-time helper who swept the house surroundings and cleared the rubbish. This woman had come to Singapore directly from mainland China, with no education, and was widowed at a very young age with an adopted daughter. So to make ends meet, she had taken on multiple jobs, including cleaning for us.

Her day at our house would usually end around 2 pm, and since her chores were relatively light, she frequently had free time on her hands. I had a love for food since I was a kid, and most people knew it. So, she would occasionally cook food that I liked to distract me whenever I was up to mischief at home. I remember a particular dish vividly. She would make fish paste from scratch, stuff it into green chillies and steam them for a couple of minutes. We would eat these stuffed chillies, dipped in soy sauce, while listening to Rediffusion or watching the TV together.

Her salary was meager; however, Chinese New Year was special to her. She would cook a huge pot of vegetarian stew and distribute it to all her relatives and friends. I remember how she would scrounge and save to buy the necessary canned and dried ingredients in dribs and drabs; in other words, her preparations for the dish began as early as 12 months before. The dish was simple but it meant a lot to me. So, I’m replicating this dish as a little tribute to this lady, from whom I learnt the art of giving, along with a number of yummy dishes!

Mixed Vegetable Stew with Preserved Bean Curd

Tie soaked lily buds into a knot to
prevent it from integrating during cooking.

Oil                                           1 tbsp

Ginger                                     1-cm slice

Button mushroom                 80 g   

Dried Shitake mushroom       10 g, soaked for 30 mins.

Dried black fungus                 5 g, soaked for 15 mins.       

Dried lily buds                        10 g, soaked for 15 mins.

Dried bean sticks                    20 g, deep-fried for 30 secs. 

Red dates                               10, soaked for 15 mins.

Cabbage                                  150 g

Preserved bean curd               2 tbsp, mashed

Vegetable stock                      750 ml

Salt                                           ½ tbsp

Method:

1.             Saute all mushrooms with ginger until fragrant.

2.             Add preserved bean curd and fry for another 5 minutes.

3.             Add stock and red dates and simmer for 20 minutes.

      4.      Add cabbage, fried bean sticks and simmer for another 15 minutes or until the vegetable    
               turns soft. Season with salt.

Mr. Bean - Keeping Alive Teochew Pastry Traditions

At 15, Chan Kim Ho was faced with a decision that would change his life forever: take over the family business, his father told him and his kid brother…or I will close it down. While his brother opted to continue his education, eventually becoming an academician at the local university, Mr Chan left school and took over the Poh Guan Cake House.

Freshly-baked Teochew pastries available everyday in the shop.

When he decided to step in, the enterprise was already old, founded almost 30 years earlier, in 1930, with just three products to sell -- peanut candy, red bean cakes, and lotus cakes. These were originally snack specialties of Hokkien province in China; their tastiness made them popular in Singapore, but they were also must-serves at weddings. When he took over the shop in 1958, Mr Chan had to work 16-hour days aided by a single helper. But business grew and he began distributing to provision shops and coffee shops.

His products became a common sight in the coffee shops of the 1960s and 70s. His peanut candies, especially, would fill large glass jars that lined the cashier’s counter; however, Mr Chan also witnessed the steady decline of Chinese pastry making. The introduction of western cakes and pastries hurt the traditional industry deeply. In the face of faltering demand and competition for a shrinking pie, Mr Chan decided to learn the preparation of bean paste fillings under two masters of the craft.

Poh Guan successfully grew after this astute move, and today employs a staff of about a dozen in the production end of the business. Despite this, the boss insists that no other person but himself should make the cake fillings.

Mr. Chan still cooks the fillings
for all his pastries personally.

Mr Chan proudly tells us that while the ingredients might be few and simple – beans, sugar, and lard; to achieve consistency of the mix, and timing in the addition of each ingredient, is a hard-won skill. The final bean paste should be moist, sweet, and meltingly smooth.

What’s heartening to this 68-year-old doyen of Chinese pastry making, however, is the revival among the young of giving out traditional Chinese cakes at weddings. This has an advantage, Mr Chan says with a twinkle in his eye, because Chinese cakes last longer, unlike the western ones that require refrigeration and have a short shelf life.

A rare treat: pepperweed kueh made with
 a hard-to-find herb from China.

While ever the traditionalist, Mr Chan also seeks to make the old, new again. From time to time, he introduces traditional cakes with newly concocted fillings such as durian, green tea, pineapple, and yam. One of the company’s creations is a cake made from a Chinese herb – or weed, as he puts it. His sister who lives in China would harvest, wash, air, and sun dry the herb, and Mr Chan would bring it back to Singapore. 

The cakes thus produced are only sold at Poh Guan, while the same cakes produced by his competitors, he whispers conspiratorially -- have the “weed” replaced with pepper! Apparently, this special herb also has medicinal benefits as a detoxification agent, remover of dark spots on skin, and eliminator of gray hair. 

Poh Guan Cake House

Blk 531 Upper Cross Street #01-57

Singapore 050531

Tel: 6534 0136

Lup Cheong & Clay Pot Rice – Two Perfect!

I remember a line from a song in Barbra Streisand’s movie Yentl, it went “The more I learned, the less I know”. That line reminds me how important it is to keep pursuing new knowledge, and to always maintain an open mind. It reminds me that sometimes even the most trivial things in life have something to teach---like preparing and eating preserved Chinese sausages, or ‘lap cheong’.

During the month-long run-up to the Lunar New Year, Singapore’s Chinatown would be transformed; its narrow streets and sidewalks lined with makeshift stalls selling all manner of festive goodies and decorations, and thronged with shoppers. What catches my eye would be the barrage of preserved food that suddenly appears like magic only at this time of year---dried sausages, waxed duck, dried fish, and even preserved animal innards imported from China or made locally.

I remember helping to make dried sausages when I was young. Meat from different parts of the pig would be carefully apportioned, minced and seasoned; the marinated meat then stuffed into pig intestines and dried in the shade for weeks. Later in life, I learned that the ideal climatic conditions for preparing such dried products in China presented themselves in the last quarter of every year. Dry desert winds from the north would hasten the drying process without scorching the meat---and thus their abundant availability at that time of year.

Needless to say, I love these sausages…especially the liver sausage, or ‘yuen cheong’. My friends and I sometimes call the especially superior versions of yuen cheong, the ‘Chinese foie gras’---with little exaggeration. The smooth richness of liver, coupled with the layered notes of the marinade---in particular of Chinese wine---is beyond description.

The dried Chinese sausage is remarkably self-sufficient, containing within its transparent sheath all of its flavor and essence; therefore, the best ways to release its culinary potential are often the most simple and basic. I like mine placed on top of rice as it cooks, so that the infused oil of the sausages flows into the rice, adding subtle flavor and a mouth-watering fragrance. Or it could be mixed with other marinated meats, in the case of clay pot rice; or made crisp and then fried with vegetables or meat.

I’ve always preferred the first option---steamed and eaten neat with oil-infused rice---thinking it was simple, straightforward and required no pre-preparation. How wrong I was! I found that out when I bought a cookbook by Gigi Ng from the famous restaurant, Ser Wang Fun, in Hong Kong last year. I knew Gigi from the years I lived in Hong Kong; I was already a die-hard fan of her restaurant’s food and its famous made-in-house dried sausages even before we met. I will write more about Ser Wang Fun’s food and review its cookbook later in this blog.

I’ve also picked up the finer points of cooking clay pot rice from a friend. This friend of mine, a famous pastry chef, has spent hours perfecting the technique he learned from master chefs during numerous trips to China.

Clay Pot Rice with Mixed Sausages.

(serves two)

Rice                 2 cups, washed and drained thoroughly

Water/stock    2 cups

Salt                  ½ tsp

Oil/lard            ½ tbsp.

Sausages         2, preferably liver and meat sausage each

Ginger             2 slices, julienned

Soy sauce       1½  tbsp

Method:

1.     Drain rice and let it rest for at least 30 minutes.

2.    Put rice in a claypot, pour boiling water, oil and salt, and let it boil vigorously for 4 minutes. Lower the heat to simmer and continue to cook for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, rotate the clay pot so that rice will be evenly cooked.

3.    Add sausages and continue to simmer for another 5 minutes.

4.    Increase the heat to the maximum for the final 5 minutes; remember to rotate the clay pot so that crust would be formed all round.

5.    Just before serving, pour soy sauce around the circumference of the lid, let the soy sauce slowly seep through the gap between the lid and the pot. The residual heat will increase the fragrance of the soy sauce before eating.

6.    Mix well before serving.

Preparation of the Sausages

1.    Boil water in a saucepan.

2.    Remove strings from the sausages and place it into the warm water.

3.    Simmer sausages for 10 minutes in the case of liver sausages or 14 minutes for meat sausages.

4.    Remove the sausages from the simmering water and let it dry in a cool corner for at least 3 hours. This step will make the skin of the sausages crisp when cooked.

5.    Pan fry sausages in a dry (without oil) pan or place it on top of the boiling rice.