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Malaysia Kitchen: The Malaysian Larder

26 Sep

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Whenever I travel to a new country, I make a point to visit at least one grocery store while I’m there. They’re like living museums; collections of objects that comprise and nourish a culture. I generally find them more interesting and exciting than the arts and antiquities found in actual museums, which belong to distant epochs and echelons, and may be fascinating in some abstract sense, but don’t give me any immediate understanding of the people around me. Plus, in grocery stores you can buy, cook, and eat the exhibits – how awesome is that?

One of the great things about living in London is that this experience is just a quick train ride away. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson’s famous words, when you’re tired of London, you’re tired of food, for there seems to be no limit to the sheer variety of food and food shops to be found here. But I’ve done my time walking the beaten paths down the aisles of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Bangladeshi, Scandinavian, and Polish supermarkets. It was time for something new, something different: Malaysian food.

Unfortunately there is no dedicated Malaysian grocer in London, but Five Crops in Charlton is the next best thing. An emporium of east and southeast Asian ingredients, they have a large section of Malaysian larder staples. I was charitably shown around by Ben, a veteran manager who clearly knew the fundamentals of Malaysian cooking. I had a shopping list of things I thought I’d need to make some killer Malaysian food of my own, but for the most part I just followed his expert advice. The first items into my basket were:
– kicap lemak manis: thick, sweet soy sauce
– kicap lemak masin: light, salty soy sauce
– sambal: a paste made from chilli, onions, garlic, fish, prawns, and tamarind
– belacan: a crumbly brick of dried, salted shrimp

Together, these four ingredients will form the foundation to a wide variety of Malaysian dishes; in concert they add sweetness, saltiness, heat, and savoury depth, and their applications go beyond traditional Malaysian preparations. I am particularly enamoured with sambal and belacan, the former for its intensity and complex sweet, sour, and spicy character and the latter for its pungent, fishy aroma and concentrated flavour. You only need a teaspoonful to season an entire pan full of food, and it works wonders for stocks in need of a little extra something. I think of it, in a way, as the prawn equivalent of Bovril (though I’m not sure how it would taste stirred into hot milk).

I had my foundation. Now it was time to start building. I stocked up on both white jasmine rice and black glutinous rice, as these provide the bulk of so many Malaysian dishes, both savoury and sweet. I got a packet of ikan bilis, adorable little dried fish that provide flavour and crunch to the national rice dish, nasi lemak. I also bought Malaysian sweet chilli paste, which is smoother and tangier than the versions from nearby countries, as well as tamarind paste. Preparing fresh tamarind is an arduous process, Ben explained, involving much washing, boiling, peeling, grinding, and straining, so the pre-made paste is what most people keep in their homes. It has a sourness unlike citrus or vinegar, somewhat like green apples but richer, with a slight brown sugar-like sweetness to it. And because it’s a paste and not a liquid, it can help thicken sauces and glazes. Another awesome ingredient to have on hand, even if you’re not making Malaysian food.

Finally I filled my basket with various aromats: curry powders for fish and meat, a packet of spices used in the Malaysian pork hotpot bak kut teh, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, galangal, and ginger. I was well on my way to making my own terrifically fresh and delicious Malaysian meals.

But there was one last thing. In my travels around southeast Asia I encountered one particularly controversial item, known to cause many first-time tasters to retch, but reverently dubbed “the king of fruits” by its many dedicated fans. Banned on Malaysian public transport for its unusual (okay, nauseating) smell but also adored for its rich, creamy flesh and complex flavour, durian is perhaps one of the weirdest foods on earth. When I first tried it five years ago, I didn’t like it. But knowing how much others do like it, I couldn’t escape from the thought that the problem is not with durian, it’s with me and my own tastes. I was determined to make a durian dish that wouldn’t disguise its flavour but harness it and perfume it and make it taste delicious to people who profess to hate it, like me.

At Five Crops they had a stack of big, beautiful durians, and Ben showed me how to choose one. (And how to handle them – their spikes can draw blood!) By pinching two adjacent spikes together, you can gauge a durian’s ripeness – no give and it is not quite ripe; if they bend slightly towards each other, ripe; and if you can touch their tips together, very ripe, and very stinky! Another way to test ripeness is to fiddle with the stem; if it’s flexible at the base, the durian is ready. I chose a very ripe one, and Ben then showed me how to open it. Holding it with gloves or a thick tea towel, find the natural seams where the spikes come together. They look like little valleys in mountainous terrain. Cut through the seams with a sharp knife, and pull the durian apart.

So there I had it. My very own durian, and a boxful of amazing new ingredients to play and experiment with. I could hardly wait to get home, get tasting, and get cooking – and that’s exactly what I did.

Visit Malaysia Kitchen for more info!

Søgaards Utzon Center Blond

7 Dec

Though Jørn Utzon isn’t exactly a household name outside of Denmark, you are almost certainly familiar with his work. He is the architect behind one of the twentieth century’s most iconic buildings, the Sydney Opera House.

The late Utzon was born in Copenhagen, but he spent most of his childhood in Ålborg, which is now home to the Utzon Center, a museum of modern architecture and art designed by the man himself, in cooperation with Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. Ålborg is also home to the ambitious Søgaards Brewery, whose range encompasses a variety of international styles and includes some unusual experiments. The Søgaards brewmasters have taken inspiration from the places that inspired Utzon’s architecture to brew two beers for the Utzon Center: Blond and Dark. The label on Utzon Blond explains:

This beer follows Utzon’s footsteps from Australia, where we have gathered the herb lemon myrtle; across Asia for the refreshing character of kaffir lime leaves and ginger; to Spain, where we have selected an orange flower honey to round off the beer and add a light floral flavor. The noble conclusion comes from the Middle East’s delicate and luxurious spice saffron.

Pretty neat. These ingredients may sound weird, but remember that before hops came into favor around the turn of the fifteenth century, bouquets of herbs and flowers called gruits were used to add flavor and bitterness to beer. Dandelion, heather, ginger, burdock, nutmeg, juniper and spruce were common. So while this beer is cosmopolitan and contemporary in its selection of international ingredients, this method of flavoring also recalls ancient brewing traditions. Especially interesting is the inclusion of honey, since the vikings were fond of a sort of mead-beer hybrid that was also flavored with odd spices and herbs.

Utzon Blond is an amber-gold ale with a pillowy white head, and it actually does hit all the notes described on the label: Australian lemon myrtle and kaffir lime leaf provide a pleasantly soapy, citric top note, while the honey gives the beer a sweet foundation. Floral, savory saffron floats by in the background. All around it is very fruity, slightly tangy and rather robust – probably not as arresting as Utzon’s designs, but just as intriguing and unique!

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Svaneke Syd-Øst for Paradis and the Importance of Glassware

12 Nov

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“Syd-Øst for Paradis” means “Southeast of Paradise,” which refers to an apparently lovely beach town called Hullehavn southeast of Svaneke on the island of Bornholm. The beer’s label describes Hullehavn as a place of “volleyball and genuine comfort” and cheerily boasts: “We have bottled the summer for you.”

In need of some sunshine during this increasingly dark and grey English November, I cracked open a Syd-Øst tonight and I poured it into three different glasses. Why three? Because I wanted to conduct a little experiment. I am something of a glassware geek, but only partly because I just think good glassware is fun and pretty. The main reason I own twice as many glasses as all three of my flatmates combined is because good glasses make for good drinkin’! I recall once drinking an Ommegang Three Philosophers, a blended Belgian-style dark ale brewed with cherries. In my Delirium Tremens tulip glass, it smelled of bananas, Scotch, and amaretto and tasted of ripe cherries and caramel; poured into to a pilsner glass for a friend, it smelled and tasted of yeast, earth, and allspice. It was entirely different – and much worse, in my opinion.

So proper glassware is important. And to prove it, I’ve chosen three very different glasses from which to enjoy my Syd-Øst, all of them from Holmegaard: the Skibsglas goblet, the No. 5 beer glass, and the Det Danske Ølglas. Oh, and by the way: Syd-Øst for Paradis is brewed with elderflowers!

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In the Skibsglas:

Smells primarily of honey, biscuits, and lemon-lime, with a mild but certainly detectable elderflower fruitiness. Tastes very sweet and very elderflowery, almost more like an elderflower cordial with some white wine notes and a trace of lemon in the background.

In the No. 5:

Much more resinous and much less fruity in the nose, hop-forward with notes of hay and lemon, but the elderflower is still there. Somewhat less sweet and more tart on the palate, but the overall flavor profile is the same.

In the Ølglas:

Surprisingly, this globe glass seems to combine the aromas of the Skibsglas and the No. 5, but subdues them both while adding unexpected smells of grape juice and herbs. The inward-turned lip of this glass delivers the beer to the front and sides of the palate, emphasizing bitterness (but the beer is still predominantly sweet).

Overall, this 3.5% ale is a bit too sweet to session, but served chilled it would make an excellent apéritif or pairing for buttery, earthy foods like foie gras or Brie. As for the best glass, it would be something between the No. 5 and the Ølglas – specifically, a narrow glass with an inward-turned lip, which would amplify hop and fruit aromas while downplaying sweetness on the tongue. A champagne flute, come to think of it, would be perfect.

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Big News: Site Repurposing!

9 Nov

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If you’re reading this post on the actual site instead of through an RSS reader, then you’ll have already noticed the dramatic redesign. This is because I am relaunching I am a viking in its new iteration as a Danish beer and food blog!

I am now a “Senior Sales Account Manager” (i.e., travelling salesman) for a company called 95% Danish, importers of fine Danish design that have recently branched out to include fine Danish craft beer in their portfolio. I’ve been brought in as the company’s beer guy – my job is to sell the beer to upmarket retailers, restaurants, and bars in Greater London. The beer, I must say, is very good – highly idiosyncratic and well-made, as one might expect from a country known for its traditions of agrarianism and craftsmanship.

This week I was spirited away to Denmark for a whirlwind tour of the breweries we represent, and have to admit I found the country rather beguiling. It isn’t somewhere I’d like to live, I don’t think, but there were several things Danish I found strangely compelling. The land, for starters, is remarkably Wisconsin-like; low, cold, and rural, molded into rolling kettles and moraines by ancient glaciation. No wonder, I thought, that so many Danes wound up settling in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Then there is the food, somehow reminiscent of Japanese cuisine in its simplicity, its fresh flavors, and its fondness for the sea, but also hearty and pig-centric in a way that reminded me of American comfort food. And of course, there is the beer, which was a revelation even to me, a hardened beer geek with over 500 reviews under my belt.

So from now on, I am a viking will be strictly an exploration of Danish culture through its food and beer. I’m still brainstorming ideas for another blog, but until that comes to fruition I’ll be posting on non-Danish topics at my very old, journal-style blog over at Xanga. I’ll also be migrating my portfolio to a new site as soon as I register a new domain name.

I understand that this is something of a departure from this blog’s original theme, but I hope that my loyal readers will stay with me as I change course. I do think that Danish culinary culture is quite interesting – and I hope that you do, too!

Cheers, kanpai, and skål!

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A First Taste of the Second City

12 Oct

A snack in New York is a meal in Chicago.

Middle American Proverb

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The aphorism quoted above doesn’t mean that Chicagoans eat meals so insubstantial that New Yorkers would only consider them snacks. Actually, the meaning is something close to the inverse: Chicago is known for appropriating, embellishing, and augmenting New snack foods to the point that they must be called a meal. I have a theory that Chicago’s “second city” status has driven its citizens to assert themselves against the hegemony of Gotham in sometimes outlandish ways; it’s connected, I think, to the fact that Chicago is the American capital of comedy. I have read somewhere that being in a “second fiddle” cultural position (e.g. being a comparatively small country right next to a much larger country) creates a sort of collective inferiority complex that engenders a good sense of humility and humor. Canada, always drowned out by their loud, angry neighbors to the south, has also produced droves of famous comedians. I hear New Zealand is also famous for comedy, as is Osaka, Japan’s second city.

So, like being funny, perhaps turning ordinary New York food into bold, italicized Chicago food is a way for the Windy City to declare cultural independence. However, in truth I can only think of two foods that substantiate the proverb. The first is pizza. Both first and second city are famous for pizza, but Chicago deep-dish is so much more deserving of that fame. It’s two or three inches high, dense as a black hole, drunk with sauce and toppings, and it achieves a sort of Golden Ratio of crunch-to-chew. Chicago pizza is to New York pizza as a bowl of Ippudo Akamaru ramen is to Cup Noodle.

But of course, the Chicago specialty most distinguished from its New York counterpart is the hot dog. Hot dogs are fundamentally uncomplicated things, and this is exactly what makes people want to complicate them. Hot dog localization isn’t a Chicago-only phenomenon, of course. But as far as I know, the Chicago hot dog is the only variation that has any sort of reputation outside of its own metro area. The words “hot dog” follow “Chicago” as naturally as “cheesesteak” follows “Philly.” It is among a very select group of American local foods that are truly famous on a nationwide level (Wisconsin cheese being another).

Unlike burgers, I think hot dogs actually demand to be festooned with all manner of toppings. Hot dogs, even high-quality, well-prepared ones, are just too bland to eat on their own. The Chicago hot dog addresses this inherent flavor deficiency with the “Chicago Seven,” an arpeggio of tangy, lively fixings that harmonize with the mellow umami of the sausage: onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, a dill pickle spear, sweet pickle relish, yellow mustard, and celery salt all piled into a poppy seed bun.* These ingredients alone would actually make a pretty tasty veggie sandwich; the hot dog itself is just a foundation, a meaty gesso onto which crisp, zesty colors are painted.

The Dog

Strangely, I have never had a Chicago hot dog, even though I grew up in Chicagoland and visit the city often. It has long been on my culinary to-do list, but for some reason it has escaped me every time I’m back home. It’s probably because Chicago offers an overwhelming abundance of dining choices, and I’m usually tempted by pizza or Mexican or Chinese or Japanese or vegetarian or Italian or whatever it may be while I’m down there.

But not this time. This time I was determined. I had always thought I would have my first Chicago dog at the Weiner’s Circle, a local institution where they serve a textbook sausage with a hearty side of profanities. Stephen Fry went there when he was touring the United States. But after consulting with local friends and perusing the internet, I settled on Hot Doug’s, consistently named Chicago’s best weinermonger – and it had a block-long line outside to prove it. Lines are always a good sign.

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Hot Doug’s ain’t just a hot dog stand – they are a self-proclaimed “Sausage Superstore,” and much of our 45-minute wait was spent mulling over what to order from the surprisingly exotic and epicurean menu. For me, there was no question that I would have “The Dog” with everything. But I couldn’t leave without trying one of their specialty sausages: I considered the tequila and black bean chicken sausage, the cherry-apple pork sausage, and of course, the Salma Hayek (“Mighty, mighty, mighty hot!”). Ultimately I decided to splurge on the foie gras and Sauternes duck sausage with truffle aioli, foie gras mousse, and sel gris (a recent re-addition to the menu following the repeal of a citywide ban on the king of offal).

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The resultant feast – a Chicago Hot Dog and a Foie Gras Duck Sausage – was like a culinary odd couple, an utterly wrong combination that nevertheless must exist, if only to act as foils to one another. The Dog was brash, spicy, and snappy, but also humble and inviting. It does have something to prove, that’s for sure, but it can’t disguise its Midwestern geniality. The Duck was silken, ripe, and decadent – yet somehow just as loud as the Dog, an ostentatious display of conspicuous consumption. Both sausages were perfection, especially between sips of the perfect accompaniment: old-fashioned birch beer.

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I cannot recommend Doug’s duck fat fries, which sound awesome and smell fantastic, but taste like nothing at all. But the fries are immaterial anyway, since the Dog really is a meal in itself. Certainly, it is one area where Chicago is second to none.

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Hot Doug’s
3324 North California
Chicago, IL 60618
773-279-9550

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