EatingAsia

In Georgetown, Assam Laksa and a Jelly Ice Treat

We've been obsessing about laksa assam.

You see, we've probably made 8 or so trips to Penang in the last three months. Penang is laksa assam ground zero. We love laksa assam. But we've consistently been coming up short.

I'm unimpressed by the famous Air Itam laksa assam. We revisited the site of a crabby old lady dishing up perhaps our favorite version ever, only to find her gone. Her replacement, a very young man who apparently knows not what it is to pour one's heart and soul into a dish, served us an insipid, overly sweet mess of a noodle.

We hit another well-known stall in a coffee shop on Penang Road. My notes read:

Not particularly sour, not particularly spicy. Thin broth, where's the fish? Not bad, not great.

Hardly a ringing endorsement.

A local directed us to an afternoons-only stall at the edge of a field opposite the well-known Padang Brown hawker center. It doesn't rate a mention. We didn't even finish our meal.

We continued our search. For a dish that's considered one of Penang's most iconic, laksa assam is surprisingly thin on the ground there. Then on Monday, as we were heading out of town, we passed a laksa assam stall on Weld Quay. It possessed all the indicators of a potentially great street food experience.

Ramshackle tables - check. Unobtrusive, to the point of entirely missable, signage - check. Vendor of a certain age - check. Gaggle of customers, some with two bowls in front of them - check. 

And an honest-to-goodness mobile set-up, attached to a bicycle - Huge. Check. This guy's been at it a while, we ascertained.

Let me say right off the bat that this version lacks pineapple and has not quite enough fresh cucumber and mint leaves for our taste. We like the zing and textural interest that the fresh ingredients add to a bowl of spicy, sour, and fishy soup.

Nonetheless, it was a laksa assam we were very happy to have made a sudden, slightly wreckless U -turn for.

The broth wasn't too thick, but deeply fish-flavored and packed with plenty of shredded fish flesh. The vendor makes his laksa assam with fresh sardines; he was pulling cooked fillets off the bone when we arrived.

No cloying sweetness here. While we could always stand for a bit more assam (sour), this bowlful had a decent enough pucker. It was plenty fiery, but not so much so as to overwhelm its other flavors.

The vendor's been dishing up his stuff for twenty years. He's proud of his product, in an understated way.

Bonus: he's parked right next to a stall selling old-fashioned shaved ice treats. We ordered one that combines clear jelly with a lychee and a piece of fresh lemon in a clear, lightly perfumed sugar syrup (pandan syrup was also an option).

What is it? I've no idea (and isn't this amazing -- after four years of steady street eating in Malaysia we're still coming across unknown-to-us specialties), but it's fabulous.

Poke the lemon slice with the side of your metal spoon, stir, and slurp. What you get is a wild combination of intense fragrance (the syrup, we assume), sharp sourness, a touch of bitterness from the lemon rind, and a textural double whammy of jagged ice clumps playing off soft, wobbly jelly. Completely refreshing.

We got back in our car and headed for the bridge, rubbing our bellies and grinning like idiots.

Laksa assam and shaved ice vendors, on Weld Quay at the corner of Gat Lebuh Aceh. 2-7pm, Mondays off.

Dange Fever

With all that rice on Sulawesi you had to know that some of it would end up in sweet treats.

As we drove north from Makassar to Toraja we came, about two hours into the ride, across a strip of roadway lined with probably fifty or so stalls selling exactly the same thing: dange, a cake made from red rice and gula aren, or sugar made with sap from the cut flower stalk of the aren palm.

The dange are cooked in clay molds laid over a wood fire, their surfaces exposed to the heat and smoke.

When the cakes are done the vendor uses a knife to unmold them onto fresh banana leaves, where they're left steam and soak in a bit of scent from the banana leaf.

We ate them hot, one after the other. Dange are absolutely appealing in both texture -- crusty outside, tender within, pleasantly chewy -- and flavor. They're nutty from the rice, sweet but not tooth-achingly so, there's a hint of bitterness and lots of caramelization from the cooked gula, and it's all overlayed with an intriguing smokiness.

All this, from two ingredients: rice and sugar.

Talk about ingenuity.

Dange sellers, south Sulawesi. If you're driving north from Makassar you can't miss 'em.