EatingAsia

Rejuvenating George Town, Penang

Old and older in George Town's Little India

Changes are afoot in George Town, Penang. We reported on the ongoing transformation of this once down-and-out (but always lovely) city, precipitated in large part by its designation as a UNESCO world heritage site in July 2008, for the New York Times.

Amelie Cafe, on Armenian Street, is just one of a number of locally-owned new businesses

Long story short: so far, so good. Yes, boutique hotels and, to a lesser extent, shops and restaurants are sprouting in George Town like mushrooms in a forest after a long rain, but the inner city still boasts a true and truly unique living culture. We hope that, despite all the changes that lie ahead, George Town never loses this part of itself.

Read the article here, and view Dave's accompanying slideshow here. More outtakes from the story on Dave's photo blog, here.

A George Town resident at Nagore Shrine. We hope the city never loses the likes of him.

To Market: Permanence and Evanescence in Luang Namtha, Laos

There was a time, when we were writing and photographing only for this site and not for a living, when our travels were all about marketing. Not the sort of marketing that requires credit cards and ends with stuffed shopping bags and a big dent in your bank account, but the kind you do if food is one of the first things you think about in the morning and among your last thoughts before bed before bed. The kind of marketing that sees you cruising crowded aisles while ogling fresh produce; trading smiles, hand gestures, and shrugs with vendors who don't speak your language any better than you speak theirs; stepping daintily between puddles in dimly lit, cavernous structures; holding your breath as you transit areas thick with the smell of caged fowl; and dodging pushcarts heaped with melons or bags of ice or pig carcasses.

Yep, Dave and I are market hounds -- connoisseurs, even. "Market before sights" is our motto; quite often sights don't figure at all into our travels around Asia and beyond. Click the 'Markets' category on our sidebar and you'll find market photos and ruminations from Mindanao to northern Sumatra. We've got a stack of notebooks and a store of photos focused purely on markets that would fill a small filing cabinet.

But this changed when we started traveling for work. Sure, we always make time to hit a market no matter where we are, but rarely anymore do we have time to do markets justice, to really dig into them the way we used to. To spend hours a day, days in a row, becoming a temporary regular. Names of produce and dried goods duly recorded, recipes eeked from busy vendors and chatty shoppers, connections made over a number of visits that enable Dave to get close with the camera.

What a refreshing change it was then, to find ourselves in Luang Namtha with no work and some time on our hands. We'd just wrapped up a couple weeks of work in Luang Prabang. We hadn't enough energy for a trek (perhaps next visit -- Luang Namtha is northern Laos' premier eco-tourism destination), but we did have a few days to ourselves in a beautiful place, with no internet and no obligations.

Of course, we reverted to our old ways. We hit the markets.

Our favorite by far was the morning market in Luang Namtha town. It's not a huge market, not a packed and heaving market. But it's a just-right kind of market. Small enough to cover thoroughly in a couple of hours, lively enough to draw us back several mornings in a row.

The market building itself is a typical small-town southeast Asian affair: open-sided, concrete pillars and wood cross beams supporting a high-pitched metal roof, a dirt floor, and several rows of permanent stalls displaying fresh and dried goods.

As you enter the market, flies buzz around a row of meat and fish stalls on the right-hand perimeter. Here too are upturned rattan baskets holding chickens awaiting their fate.

Far opposite are prepared food vendors offering cubes of rice flour jelly/cake in sour tomato water, scraping green papayas for salad,

pounding chilies and other ingredients for jaew (dips),

and rolling thick rice flour sheets speckled with bits of chopped scallion greens around pork. These rolls are then shallow-fried for a northern Lao-style spring roll, to be dipped in dark soy sauce seasoned with chopped fresh chilies.

This same vendor also makes a sort of filled dumpling by pouring rice flour batter into shallow ladles, adding a bit of pork, and then covering the pork with more batter before immersing the entire thing in hot oil. It must be said that these treats are incredibly greasy -- but absolutely delicious.

  

In between the meat sellers and the food makers are ladies (because in Laos women rule about 98% of the market) selling fresh herbs and leafy greens, dried fish and sakan (a woody stem that imparts peppery-ness to local stews and soups), mushrooms and banana flowers and pea greens, buffalo skin and mak tua nao (fermented and sun-dried soybean discs) tied in stacks, and goods imported from China: the ubiquitous oily chili-and-black-bean condiment called Lao Gan Ma (addictive, if you're into chilies) dried prickly ash (aka Sichuan peppercorn), ginseng, and dried sweet potato noodles. Among other things.

At the rear of the market several women cook broth for kao soi Lao and fer (the Laotian take on Vietnamese pho) in huge blackened pots set over wood fires. They'll serve their noodle soups all day long, at low picnic tables arranged in L and U shapes around their 'kitchens'.

Our favorite part of Luang Namtha's morning market exists for just a few hours each day. Each morning before dawn women and a few men converge on the patch of concrete in front of the market building. Plastic tarps are rolled out, newspapers and squares of cardboard unfolded and laid on the ground, bicycle-pulled carts parked and turned into display counters.

Braziers are fired up, for making sweet puffed cotton candy-like cassava crisps. Sellers squat behind their patch of concrete, arranging vegetables cultivated and foraged, small local river fish and the occasional batch of squid or prawns imported from Thailand,

wild birds, and the odd forest creature. The most plentiful items are mint, green onions (white portion sold separately from the green, which is generally eaten raw), watercress, yellow flowering mustard,

and bamboo.

There are other, less familiar vegetables -- including rice paddy herb

and clover, which we saw being harvested at the edge of dry rice paddies and alongside roads. Vendors told us it's eaten in soup.

An unusual find: puckeringly sour 'seeds', which the vendor called 'som pot' and said would be used to make 'mak som pot' -- dried, flattened discs of sourness to be used to flavor dishes?

And a favorite one: tart and spicy pickle of mustard leaves and chilies, sold with a frresh slivered scallion (the white part here) and feathery dill fronds. We are dedicated Pickle Lovers, and this preparation is one of the best we've encountered in southeast Asia. Dave and I took to purchasing a big bag every morning to add to and eat with our Lao kao soi and fer.

The corner of this evanescent section of the market belongs to rattan sellers, Akha women who trek to Luang Namtha from villages in the surrounding hills. You'd know them by their beautiful headwear

and the wooden yokes, attached to burnished rattan baskets, balanced on their shoulders.

Rattan -- yes, the same rattan used to make baskets and other furnishings -- as foodstuff was the most curious culinary discovery of our time in Luang Namtha.

It is the younger part of the rattan that's harvested for food. The sticks, which are covered with long thorns, are charred over an open flame and then stripped of their 'skin' with a sharp knife.

The inner core is boiled and its softened flesh pounded with shallots, garlic, cilantro, and various other ingredients and eaten as a dip, or added to soups and stews. (Note: you may be able to find bottled rattan shoots in Thai groceries.)

By 7:30am the crowd in front of the market is beginning to thin out. Arrive at 9am and you'll never know it was there.

Luang Namtha Morning Market -- every day, rain or shine. Arrive by 7am.

Savory, Soupy Jelly for a Hot Day in Laos

Luang Namtha isn't an obvious food destination. Most Luang Namtha dishes aren't gorgeous in the offhand way that a simple bowl of Malaysian noodles can be. The appetite rousing aroma of grilling meat doesn't hang in its air, as is often the case in Indonesia. And unlike Saigon, its streets aren't overflowing with vendors offering a staggering variety of tempting local specialties.

Yet we ate well during our visit to this remote province in northern Laos late last March. This was thanks in part to the restaurant at The Boat Landing, a laid-back riverside 'resort' (I hesitate to use that word lest it conjure images of the sort of luxe, isolated-from-the-real-world lodgings more easily found on true beaches elsewhere in the region) about 30 minutes by bicycle from Luang Namtha town.

The Boat Landing's little kitchen prepares specialties of Luang Namtha's numerous ethnic groups. Each night we dined on a variety of jaew (dips) made with unusual ingredients such as young rattan tips (creamy and a bit nutty, like sesame paste), sawtooth herb, and a local variety of Sichuan peppercorn (prickly ash, actually); soupy stews called aw lahm, packed with eggplant and snake beans and foraged leafy vegetables; toasted mak tua nao, umami-rich discs of pressed and dried fermented soybeans seasoned with chilies; and sticky rice. (Coming soon: my review of a cookbook inspired by this very kitchen and featuring recipes from around Luang Namtha.)

During the day we hit the streets, foraging as best we could -- up and out before dawn, biking first to a nearby market where we might snack a bit, and then further on into Luang Namtha town, for its relatively larger morning market. There we found a warming and delicious northern Laos-style kao soi, a good green papaya salad, some wonderful pickles, and a few other treats we'll tell you about later in the week.

In town we also discovered a restaurant -- admittedly grotty, though we never fell ill from eating there -- serving intriguing Chinese-Laotian dishes.

Cycling back to the Boat Landing mid-afternoon, we sometimes found a food stall or two open in the tiny village of lovely wooden structures up the road from The Boat Landing. Once we stopped for what was possibly the best tam mak hoong (green papaya salad) of our trip, pungently fishy with padek and made with wide flat strips of crispy papaya.

On another day a woman sitting behind a low table set next to the entrance of a shop house caught our eye. Before her was a tall container of clear liquid with a few red orbs bobbing in it, a jar of chili paste and another of MSG (a common table condiment in Laos), and a large enameled metal bowl draped with a cloth. Hung from a nail protruding from the wooded door frame were small bags of golden fried rice crackers.      

We lowered ourselves onto stools so low we might as well have been sitting on our heels, and watched as she pulled bricks of rice flour jelly from beneath the cloth. She sliced each into cubes and dropped them into small ceramic bowls.

To this she added a ladle or two of liquid and a few of the red orbs, which turned out to be cherry tomatoes. A small scoop of chili paste went on top. Finally she pulled a package of rice crackers from the hook, slit it open with her knife, and motioned for us to break the crisps over our bowls.

The liquid was sour, probably from the tomatoes but also, I think, with vinegar. Combined with the cool and bland soft jelly it made for a dish to revive us after a long, unshaded bike ride at the height of a bright-white hot-season afternoon.

We're suckers for anything hot and sour, so the fiery cilantro-seasoned and slightly fishy chili sauce made the already pleasant treat even better. And the deep-fried crackers, which retained their crunch despite immersion in the liquid, contrasted nicely with the squishy jelly. 

The next morning we spied the same dish at the Luang Namtha morning market, and found a woman making and steaming the rice jelly in its rear 'kitchen'.

Where else are these rice flour jellies eaten? We've tried something similar -- though not quite as dense -- in Chengdu and long ago, in Kunming. And Shan Burmese shave noodle-like strips from firmer, larger rice flour blocks for their version of kao soi. Not surprising, as northern Laos has long been a regional trade crossroads.

A Sweet Soup Find in Penang

Whenever we're up to Penang, which is more and more often these days, we lodge at a friend's house in George Town. And because part of the pleasure, for us, of being in Penang is ditching the car for a few days we tend to eat, shop, and hang out within a fairly circumscribed radius -- anywhere walkable within, say, 30 minutes.

Given the amount of time we've spent here over the last 2.5 years you'd think that would mean we've pretty much exhausted grazing possibilities. But no. Every stay, it seems, brings a new discovery.

Like this sweet soup, which its Chinese vendor calls simply "sago".

Sweet soups abound in Malaysia. There are Chinese-style sweet soups called tong sui, made with ingredients like peanuts, white fungus, lychees, and glutinous rice balls, and more Malay-ish sweet soups rich with coconut milk and palm sugar, such as bubur pulut hitam and bubur kacang hijau.

This sweet soup is an intriguing marriage of the two: sago pearls and chunks of softened sweet potato in a broth sweetened with brown sugar and strongly flavored with Chinese medicinal herbs, drizzled with coconut milk (squirted from a plastic squeeze bottle) just before serving. Half health tonic and half dessert, this soup bore an unmistakeable salty edge that made it strangely refreshing in the afternoon heat. A bit strange at first taste, but the sort of flavor combination that grows on you with every bite.

This discovery was serendipitous. There's no signage advertising the stall's presence, just a few tables set up underneath a plastic tarp and a couple of umbrellas in the yard of a tumbledown wooden house on Beach Street. The soup is served only on Tuesday afternoons. When we've journeyed up to Penang we've usually left on Sunday or Monday, and even when we're in town we're not often cruising treeless Beach Street at two in the afternoon, when the sun is high in the sky.

But fate or fortune brought Dave past this house one afternoon while he was shooting George Town for an upcoming article. He noticed the stall and we made a point of returning. It just happened to be Tuesday.

There are two other items on offer here -- a clear soup with beehoon (rice vermicelli) and choy sum (mustard) leaves, and a warm sweet ginger soup with taro and sweet potato that is so forcefully flavored with the rhizome that it almost burns the throat going down. (This is the soup I would want if I were suffering from a cold.)

This stall was started by the current vendor's father over 50 years ago. "You're so lucky to be here on a Tuesday!" a regular patron told us. We'd have to agree. After two bowls of sago (and a taste of the ginger soup) it was all we could do not to order a third.

Sweet soups and beehoon soup stall, Lebuh Pantai / Beach Street. Mon-Fri only from 2pm until the soups are gone. Herbal coconut sago soup Tuesdays only.

 

 

Puff the Magic Cracker

Prompted by a review -- of a new book on the cuisine of northern Laos -- that I recently finished writing for ZesterDaily (I'll link it here when it's published, probably within a week), Dave has been sorting through some photos from our excursion last March north from Luang Prabang, where we were working on a few stories for Wall Street Journal Asia, north to Luang Namtha.

Luang Namtha is a weird, complicated, fascinating place that is undergoing rapid change. We haven't posted nearly enough on our days there -- something we plan to remedy shortly.

In the meantime, here's a time-lapse of the making of an interesting snack sold at Luang Namtha's morning market: a cracker (for lack of a better word) made from ground rice cassava flour. Held over hot coals, the initial cracker 'pancake' puffs to several times its original size.

What grabbed us most about this treat -- other than the dexterity that the vendor displays as she turns it back and forth above the cooking fire  - was its texture, something akin to cotton candy. 'Light as air' would be an apt description; it dissolves almost immediately on contact with lips and tongue, leaving just a hint of sweetness.

It's also, as the time-lapse shows, a popular pre-school snack for kids lucky enough to pass by the market on their way to class.

Delicious, Despite the Presence of Foreigners

There's a piece of food-ish traveler's wisdom that says: If you're in Asia and looking for authentic/delicious/truly local (fill in the blank) food, avoid any stall or restaurant frequented by foreigners.

We say: BS. Believe it or not, some of us actually know good local grub from crap.

The veracity of this assertion was proven to me (again) on our visit to Chengdu in September. Before we left KL Dave picked up an assignment from the New York Times to shoot a food story. (Read the story and see the slideshow here; view some out-takes from the shoot -- one particularly stunning styled image in particular -- here.)

The assignment afforded us the opportunity to sample the offerings at a couple of upscale establishments; both experiences were great, and the food often quite good. But in the end we are jiachang cai (home-style food) folks. So it should come as no surprise that we most cottoned to the vittles that came out of the kitchen at the least pretentious establishment featured in the write-up: Yang Yang.

The thing is, if we subscribed to that 'avoid the places where foreigners eat' traveler's adage above and had arrived at Yang Yang under our own steam, we would never have set foot in the place. There were foreigners, lots of foreigners occupying tables on Yang Yang's front porch, and more inside. More foreigners, in fact, than we've ever seen at any of the places we frequent here in Malaysia.

That said, there were plenty of locals too. The point is -- everyone was there for the same thing: truly delicious renditions of (mostly) Sichuanese favorites.

We were somewhat restricted in what we could order in that Dave needed photogenic dishes. I think we did OK.

Pictured above, 'water-boiled' beef, pig intestines deep-fried and then fried again with fresh green and dried red chilies, and pao cai, or pickle. A hint: wherever you eat in Chengdu, whether it be at a noodle stall or a restaurant like Yang Yang, order pao cai. Every place makes its own, and they're all different.)

Not pictured, because they weren't pretty enough: spinach stir-fried with dried red chilies and hua jiao (Sichuan 'peppercorns'); liang ban zhu er gen (aka fish mint) -- an appealingly astringent, citrusy leaf -- tossed with chili oil-black vinegar-sugar dressing; and what the restaurant calls 'Japanese dofu' (the type of soft, smooth bean curd sold in a plastic tube) in sweet and sour sauce.

The latter dish was Yang Yang's only misstep, clearly designed for foreign palates, cloyingly sweet and just all around meh.

The others, however, would make a Sichuanese grandmother proud. We assured the waitress that yes, we chi la (eat spicy), and the kitchen delivered.

Though the deep-fried intestines were too rich to allow more than a few bites, we loved the contrast of the super fatty, pungent offal with the still-crisp fresh green and the dried red chilies -- a perfect balance. The water boiled beef, perched on a bed of mustard leaves, mostly submerged in a pool of ferociously ma-la oil, and crowned with a golfball of pulverized garlic, qualifies as a dream dish in our books.

More innards (L) and cabbage stir-fried with pork and pickled red chilies

Was this the absolute tastiest meal we had on this last trip to Chengdu? No. But it came darned close, and wecan't wait to mine Yang Yang's menu on our next journey to the land of ma-la.

We'd even be willing to sit next to a table of foreigners.

Yang Yang, 32 Jin Yuan Xiang, Wu Hou District; 86-28-8523-1394.

 

 

Innards Lovers Alert: A Noodle Not to Miss in Chengdu

 

To my mind there are few Sichuanese pasta dishes as delicious as dandan mian . But Chengdu boasts many other noodle specialties well worth keeping your eye out for. There's these comforting shouzhuang mian, for instance. And on a warm day (or even a cold one) it's hard to beat a well-tossed liang mian.

And then there's feichang fen. Unlike the aforementioned dishes this one may not be for everyone. The wonderfully elastic noodles, made of sweet potato flour, are utterly accessible. But the main ingredient, pigs' large intestines, might just give some pause.

Not far from Chengdu's Xin Nan bus station is a shop selling guokui -- both the griddled version, like the greasy-good ones in this post, and the 'tandoor'-baked pita-like version eaten stuffed with your choice of filling (to be honest, here they're not as tasty as the ones we swooned over in this post). In an adjacent room, it's all about feichang fen.

The sweet potato noodles for this dish are made steps from the shop's bubbling pot of innards broth. It's a quick and simple procedure: thickish batter is pushed through a sieve directly into boiling water and after a few minutes the noodles are spooled onto a pair of chopsticks, then transferred to cool water to stop the cooking. There they remain (top photo) until made into a dish.

Proving once again that one can do almost anything while smoking

Like most any Chinese noodle dish feichang fen is made-to-taste fare: spicy or not, with or without bean sprouts or intestine pieces (or with an extra portion of innards). Also available here: xin fei tang, or heart and lung soup.)

For our order the noodle master placed chopped scallions and Chinese celery, la jiao you ('sandy' chili oil), garlic, vinegar, a dash of soy sauce and MSG in bowl.

He placed bean sprouts together with noodles in a long-handled strainer and submerged that into the guts broth, leaving it there just long enough for the sprouts to wilt and the noodles, which are already fully cooked, to heat up

He then dumped these on top of the condiments, topped it all up with a little broth, and added pieces of intestine.

The verdict?

Dave, long an innards lover, truly enjoyed this dish. I eat intestine and other bits and bobs on occasion, but to my palate the broth was over-the-top funky to the point I couldn't bear more than a few sips. (Dave was happy to finish our shared bowl all by his own self.)

The seasoning was perfect, however -- we asked for 'extra spicy' and very vinegar-y and the noodle master delivered on both fronts (thumbs up always to Asian food vendors who take our caucasian selves seriously when we say we want it spicy) -- and the noodles divine. More substantial than rice noodles, not as heavy as wheat noodles, pleasingly elastic, utterly slurpable, sweet potato noodles may just be the ultimate pasta.

An absolute Do Not Miss for any pasta and guts loving traveler headed to Chengdu.

Jin Tang Jiu Long Guo Kui (look for red characters on a white sign), corner of Xin Nan Lu and Nan Tai Lu, Chengdu. Morning to evening.

 

Nutmeg Juice: Only on Penang?

Nutmeg at a Penang market: seeds with mace still attached, left, and whole fruit

Our last post on breakfasting (several times over) in the western Penang village of Balik Pulau elicited a few emails, all asking for more information about nutmeg juice.

As frequent visitors to Penang we have come to take nutmeg juice for granted. And given that nutmeg is grown elsewhere in the region, as well as in the Caribbean, it never occurred to us that its juice might be not also be consumed elsewhere. But cursory research suggests that just maybe Penang-ites are the only folks juicing the fruit.

Nutmeg is native to the Moluccas in Indonesia (also known as the 'spice islands'). The pale yellow-green, egg-shaped fruit encloses a brown seed -- this, after drying, is the spice we know as nutmeg' -- encased in an orange 'web' which, dried, is mace.

We might assume that the nutmeg tree (Myristica fragrans) made its way from the Spice Islands to Penang, where it's grown in the west and northwest, on ships that plied southeast Asia's spice trade route (George Town was a major port on the route). But supposedly nutmeg and cloves were prised from the grip of the Dutch, who made Indonesia a colony and maintained a monopoly on these two precious spices, by a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre (yes, that's Peter Pepper). Poivre is said, after two failed attempts, to have gotten his hands on over a thousand rooted nutmeg and clove trees in 1770. He planted them on his estate on Mauritius and from there they spread. (This tale is from the excellent cookbook Where Flavor Was Born.)

Nutmeg was introduced to Penang by the British, who established George Town in 1786.

These days northern Sulawesi, Indonesia is the world's largest nutmeg exporter, supplying almost 75% of our nutmeg needs. But it seems there's no juicing happening on that Indonesian island. Instead, Sulawesians are converting the 'waste' fruit leftover from nutmeg and mace production into another export product: charcoal.

According to Culinaria's authoritive Southeast Asian Specialties nutmeg fruit "is either candied or made into preserves in its native land." In Cradle of Flavor James Oseland writes that during nutmeg's twice-a-year harvest cooks on Indonesia's Banda Islands make use of its fruit by adding it "to stews and curries for its acidity" and, finely slivered, to "the chile-hot sambal buah pala. It's also candied and used to make a jam called seleh pala". There's no mention at all of useage of the fruit in the Nutmeg entry in The Oxford Companion to Food (presumably this oversight will be remedied in the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Southeast Asian Food, co-edited by Indonesian cookbook author Sri Owen), nor in Ian Hemphill's Spice Notes and Recipes.

Fresh "white" nutmeg juice, with a Chinese sour plum

On Penang fresh nutmeg fruits can be found in most wet markets. The fleshy fruit is sliced and made into a pickle (also available at most wet markets) but, most memorably, squeezed for juice. "White" nutmeg juice is light green-yellowish, tangy and almost grassy in taste, and it's often flavored with a Chinese sour plums. The juice is also boiled to a syrup and used in a much sweeter, brownish iced drink.

For a Westerner like myself who grew up associating the flavor of nutmeg with pumpkin pie and eggnog, tasting the dried seed's warm, mellow spiciness in a fresh, tart juice was, well, startling. But the weirdness dissipated quickly. It's a strange but really delightful beverage, one that I certainly would (and have) drive around an island for.

Given that nutmeg juice seems limited to Penang (chime in readers, I'm happy to be corrected here -- where else have you seen/drunk fresh nutmeg juice?), it seems almost criminal to visit the island and leave without trying the fresh stuff. Find it in coffee shops, more easily in the west of the island than in George Town.

Update Nov 8 2010: one of our Twitter followers reports that nutmeg juice is popular in the home of nutmeg, the Indonesian Molucca islands.

The Other Side of the Island

We spent last weekend in Penang. On  Sunday, determined to get out of our George Town rut (if one can ever call something as pleasurable as staying and eating in George Town a 'rut'), we drove over to the west side of the island.

Our destination was Balik Pulau, a small village that's known for its Sunday market -- which truth to tell wasn't all that interesting. It must have been so when all the buying and selling happened in the great old, now-empty market building on Balik Pulau's main street. The new structure, built by the bus terminus, is just fine -- big and airy and cleaner, I'm sure, than the old. The fish looked good, and there were the usual vegetables and fruits and dried goods. (One less-than-usual site: a vendor selling what appeared to be freshly dead geckos. A medicinal thing, I think.) There's a food court in the new building, and we'll probably explore it at some point. Stalls were set up across the road, but about half appeared to be selling clothing and such.

Nothing to capture our fancy, really. So we headed back into 'town' to hunt up some breakfast.

We just love Balik Pulau's main street, with its remaining wooden structures, a few grand George Town-style shop houses, the aforementioned old-style market building, and all sorts of places to eat. It's got such a great, almost festive atmosphere on Sunday mornings (we arrived around 9am), busy as all get out with folks in town to catch up with friends, do a spot of shopping and, of course (this is Malaysia after all!) get a good meal -- and maybe a snack too -- in before heading home.

Balik Pulau boasts what might just be the island's best siam laksa (a clearly Thai-influenced, coconut milk-based gravy heavy on the lemongrass with chewy round laksa noodles) -- something we know from our last visit. But this time around we thought we'd explore other options.

We made a circumference around the old market building and knew fairly quickly that this is where our grazing would focus, starting with a stall at the back of a coffee shop that fronts the main street. It was a simple set-up: fish and one pot on a single burner. As soon as the female half of this husband-and-wife vendor team lifted the lid from that pot, letting loose a curry-scented cloud, our initial tasting was decided.

The husband has been making and selling fish curry and rice -- nothing else -- for over 10 years. All morning the curry bubbles away in the pot, getting stronger in taste as more and more fish is added to cook. Dave opted for a whole small pomfret while I went for a 'sea bass' steak.

Absolutely fantastic they both were, bathed in a spicy curry neither lemak (made with coconut milk) nor necessarily assam (sour), but almost briney in its fishiness, much like a bouillabaise. The gravy was thick with lemongrass and shallots. We might have added seasoning with soy sauce from the table, but it seemed unnecessary. The next time we're in Penang we plan to pick up a bag of curry, fishless, and pack it home to use in our own kitchen.

The lane deadends at a welding yard. It's there that we ordered our next meal, at a busy stall catering to probably 10 or 15 tables, all of them packed. Seafood is the theme here and there's much to choose from: porridge, several kinds of noodles including some in soup and some cooked in claypots. We watched a number of dishes come off the burner and decided on seafood cooked in a gravy with yellow noodles.

After five minutes it became apparent that the wait would be long, so I wandered out to the lane to a char koay kak (fried 'carrot' cake) stall. This may have been the best version of this hawker food that we've ever eaten, even better than one that we quite like in George Town's Chow Rasta market.

There's no theatrics here. The vendor doesn't clank and clang his spatula against his griddle while tossing cubes of carrot cake into the air, he doesn't fling bean sprouts into the mix or break eggs with a flourish. Instead, he works quietly, slowly, and intently, barely lifting his spatula from the grill.

Our char koay kak included bean sprouts, egg, chinese chives, and finely chopped salted vegetable, the latter a nice addition that's new to us. The carrot cake here is cut into smaller-than-usual cubes, which makes for an excellent smoky-charred-surface to untouched-by-direct-heat-interior ratio. What's more, the cubes are so thoroughly heated through that they become creamy.

It's hard not to like char koay kak -- it's fried and greasy and tasty in that "I only allow myself this sort of thing once in a while" sort of way. But this is a char koay kak that we would go out of our way to eat again and again. Not everyday, perhaps, on order of our doctor.

Coming on the heels of that char koay kak our seafood noodles really needed to deliver. And they did, with wonderfully fresh -- and perfectly cooked -- prawns, squid and chunks of firm white fish and a light gravy more fish stock than soy sauce that echoed the taste of the seafood. We'd like to return to this place to sample the seafood porridge and claypot noodles. Everything arriving to other tables looked scrumptious.

At this point we were stuffed, but we hadn't yet had any fresh nutmeg juice -- reason in itself to head to Balik Pulau -- so we stopped in at the coffee shop famous for its mee siam.

Nutmeg juice, for which the 'peels' or skins of the fruit are squeezed, is something any visitor to Penang simply should not miss. At first sip the brain says "eggnog", so strong is the nutmeg flavor. Then it processes the fruity, slightly sour (from a Chinese salted plum that's added) quality of the drink. Nutmeg juice sounds unlikely but is entirely refreshing, and delicious.

As might be predicted, while sipping our juices we caved to the scent of mee siam wafting around the joint, and order a bowl to share. Waddling back to our car, we didn't regret a thing.

Stand facing the old market building on Balik Pulau's main street. The fish curry stall is in the lane on the left side of the market. Continue straight down the lane. The char koay kak vendor is on your left; opposite him is the seafood noodles/porridge stall. Continue around the circumferance of the market and you end up at the coffee shop serving nutmeg juice and mee siam (among other things). Across the street is a very decent asam laksa. For more on Balik Pulau go here and here.

 

 

 

In Chengdu, the Not-Hot Pot Hot Pot

Let it be known that you are headed to Chengdu and you will be told: "Don't miss the hot pot!"

"Make time for hot pot!"

"Be sure to eat hot pot!"

"You gotta have hot pot!"

"I hear the hot pot's amazing!"

Hot pot hot pot hot pot hot pot hot pot hot pot hot pot hot pot.

The truth? Sichuan-style hot pot, a variation on Mongolian hot pot or steamboat that replaces the boiling water in which various items are cooked with oil floating chilies and spices, is not Chengdu's culinary superstar.

Even though it was allegedly invented in Chongqing, hot pot is all over the place in Chengdu. Some streets are lined with what seems to be nothing but huge hot pot emporiums.

A variation on the hot pot theme is chuan-chuan. The name refers to the wooden sticks that ingredients are threaded on. The larger chuan-chuan restaurants are equipped with big walk-in refrigerators, from which you select from 30 or more skewered ingredients, piling the laden sticks up on cafeteria-style plastic trays. At the end of the meal your table is charged according to how many used sticks have accumulated in the container next to it.

Chuan-chuan is fun -- the perfect lazy-meal way to pass an evening with friends -- and it can be tasty and quite cheap. It's good post-bar hopping food, the way a Burger King whopper can be. But in the end, even if the ingredients are stellar, you're cooking them in a big vat of oil. And sometimes that oil has sinister origins, so when it comes to hot pot and chuan-chuan you really need to be careful where you eat. 

Still, the idea -- your own personal selection of ingredients cooked in liquid imbued with chilies and Sichuan peppercorns and other characteristic Sichuanese spices -- does hold great appeal.

Enter mao cai.

Think of mao cai as a single-serving personalized hot pot. The mao cai vendor -- like this woman, working out of a several meter-by-several meter shop in an alley in Chengdu -- has three essential pieces of equipment: a big-ass burner (here, fashioned from an oil drum), an equally large pot, and a handled sieve.

In the pot:broth topped with a thin skim of oil. This lady boils chilies, Sichuan peppercorns, cassia, bay leaves, false cardamom, ginger and other bits for two hours before opening shop.

Stacked on shelves inside the shop, a choice of ingredients:

sliced dried dofu - cucumber - winter melon - oyster mushrooms

bok choy - blood 'pudding' - konnyaku slices - rice 'jelly' noodles

bean sprouts - potato - lotus root

sweet potato noodles - strips of sea vegetable - wood ear fungus

Assembling your meal is as easy as pointing. She grabs a handful of whatever you choose to add to your mao cai, places it in her handled sieve, and lowers it -- each ingredient separately, to get the cooking time right -- into the bubbling cauldron, then deposits it into a bowl. At the end, it's all doused with a few ladles of fragrant broth. Black vinegar, soy sauce, and chili oil at the table are yours to add as you wish.

The end result is hot pot-ish but better. The same big flavor, the same unique-to-you selection of ingredients, but less greasy and easier to eat.

Heading to Chengdu? Skip the hot pot. But do learn to recognize the characters for mao cai:

 冒菜