Malaysia

You know Hainanese Chicken Rice, right? Awesome steamed chicken served with chicken, garlic and sesame oil flavoured rice… yeah? You know it? If you don’t, go Wiki it, dong!

It’s pretty awesome.

But in Melaka, they have GONE AND MADE IT BETTER by squishing the rice into the shape of a ball! So much easier for stupid foreigners like myself to pick up with chopsticks, and inexplicably, so much more delicious.

I tried two chicken rice ball shops on Jonker Street, and one of them, Famosa, was rather good but not great (on a sidenote though, they did a great clear fishball soup).  The other was orgasmically delicious (shut up spellcheck, that is totally a word!).  But you had to queue for ages to get a seat on the weekend.  But it was worth it.

So which one was it?  The very humbly fitted out Cheung Wah. just on the Jonker Walk side of the main bridge, across the river from the Dutch Square, in a white shop.  Look for the shop with a man chopping up a whole barnyard of chickens every five minutes in the front window, and a queue snaking out to the carpark and dangerously on to the road.  They have a sign but it’s high up, so you can’t really see it from the street.

Everything here was delicious.  The steamed chicken was melt-in-the-mouth and beautifully seasoned.  The homemade chili sauce, with bountiful garlic, was just outstanding and not too oily.  And the rice balls.  Oh, the rice balls.  Pillow soft and cooked just right so they didn’t fall apart when you bit into them.  You could use them to soak up the chicken broth on your plate and some more of the chili sauce.

I would have taken more photos, but I ate the food instead because it was too good for wasting time messing about with cameras.

They also served up a yummy fresh lime juice.

Tee hee!  The limes look like Pacman and Mrs Pacman!

I ended up grabbing breakfast here before catching the bus out of town because it was so great I needed another hit.  And a tip… the queues are non existant or shorter early in the morning, especially on a Monday morning when all the Singaporeans have gone back home. Avoid weekend lunchtime if possible!  It was much better than any of the chicken rice I have tried in Singapore or elsewhere.

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It was really really really disgustingly sweaty dehydration-inducing HOT when I was in Melaka, so luckily one of the local specialities is cendol (pronounced CHEN-doll), a shaved ice treat.

The cendol actually isn’t the ice treat itself, but the squiggly green worms you can see in the picture above. The worms are made out of green pea flour and pandan leaf juice. They are served with shaved ice, coconut milk, red beans and the most delicious Gula Melaka syrup. Gula Melaka, pictured below, is a local sugar made from coconut. It’s got a strong caramel flavour and is very delicious. You can also buy lollies and other treats made with the sugar.

The cendol at the top is from a stand outside the Formosa Chicken Ball Shop on Jonker Walk. It was very nice indeed. But the most raved about shop is Jonker No. 88. It’s Gula Melaka syrup is especially revered among the droves of Singaporeans who visit on weekends.

I tried a Es Kacang Mangga from there, and it was so moreish. I would have eaten more, except there was a big queue and it was too hot to line up again in the sun!! There were also people hovering to take my table as well!

Here’s a pic:

It has shaved ice, slices of fresh local mango, red beans and sweet corn, covered in the delicious Gula Melaka syrup. Mmmm.

The thing I liked best about both these desserts is that they weren’t sickly sweet.  Just sweet enough, and very light and refreshing.

PS.  My 50mm 1.4 Canon lens is the best investment I ever made for food photos.  The bottom one is taken on my old Sigma 17-70… see how much better the top one is!!!

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Even though I wasn’t going to eat any sate in Malaysia because we all know it was invented in Indonesia and they probably stole it just like they stole dangdut and Manohara (but they ain’t going to get Ambalat, dammit!), I ended up giving in when I saw that there was a local specialty called sate celup, which is cooked much differently to your normal smoky street grilled sate sticks of goodness.

Sate celup stands have a big hole in the middle of the table, which is actually a pot of sate sauce, a little runnier that the usual sate sauce, which is boiled from below by some magical gas tank contraption that one hopes meets some sort of safety standards.  See the picture above.

I had my sate celup at the Jonker Walk weekend night markets, but there are lots of sate celup stores around, each boasting some sort of special ingredient in their sauce.  At this stand, the owner told me that her otak-otak skewers were the most delicious around.  I wasn’t in town long enough to do a comparative study though. Below is a picture of some of the range of sticks you could choose. There was a little stand of them, you paid by the stick, and then plonked yourself down at one of the circular tables/cooking pots. There were sticks with eggplant, beef, prawns, otak-otak, dumplings, fish balls… all manner of things.

Then, to cook the raw and semi-raw ingredients, you just stick them in the boiling pot of sate sauce. It’s hard to know exactly how long to keep them in there for… for the precooked stuff, it doesn’t need too long, but the raw meat and seafood is a bit more of an art.

As for the taste, the sate sauce had a bit of a kick, but a kick I call “tourist chili lite”… enough spice to excite but not to offend. It wasn’t as robust a peanut flavour as your traditional grilled sate sticks. But the otak-otak sticks were pretty yummy. I think this style of sate is about the fun factor though… there were lots of large groups and families enjoying the ceremony of cooking their own food in the pots. Definitely good fun.

But pretty messy.  If I made this much of a mess, just imagine what the kids on the next table were doing.  But that’s the joy of street food… nobody cares!

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