Vegan Malay

It's always something that keeps me from posting as much as I would like, but when you feast your eyes on my latest excuse, I have to believe you will accept it readily. See, I've been in the kitchen...I know...as per usual, right? But it was not just any kitchen, nay, I've been in the kitchen at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York City, where I was taking a vegan pastry intensive taught by my favorite "dessert diva," Fran Costigan and attended by my favorite...well, words fail, so let's just stick with "my favorite," Danette. It was just perfect. My camera's memory card is full and I'm still lost in a swirl over all that I've learned and all that the class confirmed (basically that I want to be in the kitchen making dessert pretty much whenever possible), but stay tuned for a Vegan Baking Bootcamp Round-Up. In the interim, a post featuring, as promised, actual vegetables (!) and an uncharacteristic quantity of fake meat in the service of a Malay feast to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year and the beginning of the year of the earth rat.

Black Pepper "Chicken,"
a variation on a core Malaysian dish, Black Pepper Crab

I still remember the tremendous noise of firecrackers echoing down seemingly every street to mark the beginning of the Chinese New Year in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia where my family and I lived . The red envelopes and bright gold coin decorations, the lion dances, the calls of "Gong Xi Fa Cai!" ("Prosperous New Year!") , the sights and sounds of Chinese New Year merge with my other favorite memories of Malaysia--the tastes. There was nothing better to me than going down to the night market hawker stands and visiting all my favorite vendors. I'd pull my parents toward the sweet potato balls, to the fresh juice stand for green apple juice and juicy wedges of pineapple, over to our "mee lady" with her huge bowls of salty broth, long tangles of noodles and veggies, a quick stop across the aisle for the smoky char of spice encrusted satay with peanut sauce, and for dessert, "ABC" (Ait Batu Campur or Ais Kacang) a favorite sweet ending in Malaysia, made many different ways throughout the country, but as I knew it, a bowl of shaved ice with evaporated milk, red beans, corn, green jelly and a sweet red syrup on top. Maybe you had to be there, but I swear it was delicious.

Vegan "Pouch Chickens", complete with freaky molded heads

I often celebrate Chinese New Year with my friends and tend to bring in elements of the Malay food that I loved in addition to other more strictly Chinese dishes, but this year it was a totally Malay-style feast featuring lots of lemongrass, garlic, shallots, peanuts, chilies, coconut, and a soundtrack by pop dance video mavericks, the CT Girls (that's Chili and Tomato to you), my perverse enjoyment of which is probably less endearing than it is annoying. I, however, consider the playing of crazy C-pop videos (I have a whole CT Girls DVD--thanks Jay-Jay!) to be the chef's prerogative.

Fresh Pineapple and "Fish" Curry

While I generally prefer fresh vegetables and proteins like nuts, tofu or tempeh, I indulged in a little bit of culinary play to create some Malay dishes with both the flavor and textures of the originals intact. A trip to the Asian megastore, Super 88, yielded much in the way of choices for fake meats and I couldn't resist the little vegan "chickens" or the nori wrapped "fish"--both grotesque in their form and names (pouch chickens and mouth breeder, respectively)--but interesting and fun to use as really different ingredients.

the unappetizingly named Mouth Breeder

Begin a peninsular state, Malaysia makes much of sea flavors and utilizes many sea animals in its cuisine. Shrimp paste (balacan), ikan bilis (tiny dried fish used in cooking and eaten as snacks on the go from paper lunch sacks), and oyster sauce are omnipresent ingredients, but dark tamari and shredded nori add a vegan-style salty sea flavor to dishes that call for it and firm tofu or soy protein fish can stand in for fish or shrimp in many dishes.

The formation of Malaysia as a pennisula has meant much more for the development of its cuisine than just a penchant for "seafood" though. As a pennisula, Malaysia has been a dynamic trading ground for centuries, hosting explorers from Arab lands, India, China, Indonesia, and Portugal, as well as other European countries. The Orang Asli (you many recognize the root of orangutan here--orang is a native Malay word meaning "man") are original people of the peninsula, but the country is an extremely diverse one, and everyone brought their own culinary traditions into the mix. Neighboring Thailand also has had influence on Malay cooking, though most notably in the Nothern areas, while the most popular dishes of the South are marked by a Javanese influence and feature heavier, richer coconut cream based curries. Throughout the country though, spice is the unifying theme. Sambals, pureed chilies and other spices and vegetables, are almost always present as condiments at meals, in addition to the spice pastes with which much Malay cooking begins.

Veggie "Beef" Randang Curry

Indian traders from the south introduced the people of Malacca to Islam and from that port the religion and food traditions spread and mingled with native Malay cooking. This is a particularly notable influence on the national favorite, randang curry, a rich coconutty dish with lots of spice and, traditionally, shredded beef (replaced easily with seitan). Other similar dishes have been highly influenced by Javanese muslims, while Chinese workers also brought their food into Malaysia and developed uniquely Malay versions of dishes common to their regions. Most notably, the Chinese who settled in the Straits and combined Chinese elements of cooking with Malay ingredients and flavors created a cuisine known as Nonya, which is a unique culinary tradition that is prized by Malays as one of the most creative and delicious in the country. Colonial Brits and Portugese traders who centered themselves in Penang and Malacca, respectively, also influenced Malay cuisine. Even Middle Eastern spice traders left their mark on Malay cooking with cardamom, cumin and coriander, which Malay cooks married with star anise and peppercorns from China and wild ginger, galangal, chilies, and lemongrass from their own backyards.

fresh water chestnuts

It was a particular pleasure to pick out all of the produce for this dinner. I try to focus my purchasing on seasonal and regional, if not local, produce, but I gave myself no such restraint for Chinese New Year and purchased gorgeous red-brown fresh water chestnuts, bright white bean sprouts, sweet and tenderly crisp snap peas, show-stoppingly red bell peppers, glossy purple Chinese eggplant, a huge green papaya, fragrant pineapple, fresh coconut, mounds of tangerines for good luck and prosperity, tart limes, crunchy jicama, handfuls of garlic and shallots, bunches of fresh Thai bail, purple basil, mint and lemongrass. Each fruit and every vegetable felt extremely special. It always seems important to me to value your ingredients while cooking and to care about selecting delicious things to work with, but when making a special meal like this, it's even more significant to pick the best and to think about every ingredient that goes toward creating the dish as a whole.

garlicy snap peas with fresh water chestnuts and bean sprouts

I also gave in and bought a bunch of beautiful orchids like the ones I used to buy myself from the morning wet markets with my allowance in Malaysia. Of course, orchids were considerably more affordable to me in Malaysia, even on my pre-teen budget, but a simple (organic--you really don't want floral pesticides mingling with your food) garnish like this can elevate each dish. It's nice to have each big bowl of food feel elegant and distinct when set out for people to serve themselves from.

green papaya with seeds

All of the fresh tropical fruit found its way into a range of dishes, fruit not being bound primarily to dessert-style recipes in Malaysia, as it is in the West. The pineapple was used in the bright yellow fish curry both pureed as part of the curry sauce and as big coconut and spice infused chunks. Rambutans made it into the dessert, and the papaya became a mildly spicy salad with big flavor from purple basil, mint, palm sugar and chilies. This light and cooling salad is a favorite around here, though we mostly have it in the summer. It was, however, a complement to some of the heavier dishes at dinner and it made good use of carrots stored from our fall harvest, which are still sweet and delicious, if a bit rubbery at first (a good soak in ice water perked them up before being subjected them to the food processor).

green papaya salad with basil and mint

Another light starter at our dinner was this popiah, a Malay twist on the popular Chinese fresh roll. In popiah, part of the filling mixture, a grated jicama, cabbage and bean curd spice mixture is cooked before being combined with fresh ingredients like bean sprouts, basil and lettuce and condiments like black bean sauce, chili oil, garlic paste and fried crispy shallots. It is wrapped in a lumpia wrapper, a flour-based crepe-like wrapper that is avaliable in the frozen section of Asian markets and is generally egg and dairy-free.

popiah with fresh peanut sauce

Popiah are an example of Nonya cooking in Malaysia and though they are flavorful enough to eat on their own, in the spirit of mixing elements of different cuisines, I took another popular Malay condiment, the peanut sauce served with grilled satay and paired it with the popiah, leaving out the usual ground peanuts in the roll.

Sambal Terong

An eggplant dish like this is another great example of Nonya cooking, blending a traditional Chinese eggplant dish with a salty soybean and shrimp paste (I used a sheet of toasted nori pureed with hot water in addition to the soybean paste to get a strong sea flavor) and fresh Thai basil, infusing it with a generous portion of garlic and shallot and lightly stir frying.

Mee Gorang

Another example of the tendency to meld cuisines and put a distinctly Malay spin on things is found in the popular dish, Mee Gorang. Mee Gorang is a dish that originated with the Malay Indian community, many of whom originally came from South India, but it is nothing like anything you might typically think of as Indian cuisine as it picks up on the Chinese use of noodles and fried tofu and an array of favorite Malay spices and flavorings, namely belacan and chilies. This is a quintessential bit of hawker stall food--a big plate of mee gorang and a glass of fresh juice in the still, hot open air of a night market with music from stalls down the way mingling in a pleasant sort of cacophony, a bit of red bean ice to follow--it's the kind of thing that can make you fall in love with Malaysia. When I was in Singapore a couple years ago, I got a vegan version of mee gorang that featured an array of fake shrimp and chicken as well as tofu, but in this version I relied on fried hard bean curd cakes, steamed tofu cubes and some scrambled silken tofu to approximate the egg that is usually present in this dish. With the bitter watercress, the fresh noodles, a squeeze of sour lime, crunch of peanuts and sprouts, the fire of the chilies and the omnipresent garlic and shallots--it was clearly a re-interpretation of mee gorang, but it hit every note of old love in my memory right on.

Nasi Kemuli

Most of the rice I had in Malaysia was of the steamed and white variety, but in searching through Malay recipes and getting ideas of what to prepare for this dinner, I came across a recipe for nasi kemuli, a traditional Nonya rice that is served on special occasions. It's prepared by putting whole spices right into the water--cloves, cardamon, star anise, cinnamon and coriander make it smell like some kind of supremely delicious dessert steaming away, but the sweet spices are right at home beside a spicy curry dish, a fragrant and light complement.

sunset on a rambutan

All of the cooking I did was lots of fun, but how could anything surpass the delight of South East Asian fruits like the rambutan? This photograph is actually a cheat, it's from late in the summer when I found fresh rambutans and couldn't help myself, despite the price tag, but I wanted to be able to show the whole fruit.

close up rambutan

It seems like people in the States are becoming more familiar with the lychee, another popular fruit in Malaysia, while fresh rambutans have been less avaliable. Even in a canned form they seem only recently to be generally avaliable here. The texture and structure of the fruit is much like that of a lychee. It is a soft, juicy, translucent pearl-colored fruit wrapped in wild little red whorls with a flavor that is indescribable. The word I'm looking for to hint at the layered complexity of its taste might be umami; it is a full taste, bold and subtle, addictive, bright, dusky, delicious.


No such luck on finding fresh rambutans at this time of year however, despite my resolve to splurge on my friends, so I turned to canned, which sadly seem to be avaliable only in syrup. As a broad avoider of sugar that I can't account for, which is to say, any sweeteners that I myself do not put in things, I would never ordinarily buy fruit in syrup, but when you're hard up for rambutans in Boston in February, you take what you can get. I also immediately fell for these cans, being as I am, a great sucker for attractive packaging. I rinsed them as best I could and then tossed them into half a pineapple with some lucky tangerines and pomegranates for our prosperity in the year to come.

lucky fruit salad

Rambutans in a different form also found their way into the other dessert, red bean cupcakes with rambutan cream cheese frosting and toasted black and white sesame seeds.

dehydrated rambutan

I came across dehydrated mangosteen once in a Trader Joe's, which I had used in this cupcake's frosting previously, so when I found these rambutans I wondered if they would be as good. Turns out that they're even better. The flavor is stronger and more alluring and it pairs well with the earthy sweet bean filling.

red bean cupcakes

These cupcakes have become a year-round favorite, but they're a holiday expectation. The idea that I would not make these for Chinese New Year is unthinkable. A preemptive death threat (made, I like to think, with love) was actually even issued as insurance against my considering another dessert, which I only did because I'm full of inspiration from Pichet Ong's Sweet Spot, an Asian dessert book that I'm in love with. As much as I would have liked to rock out something from his book for this event, I'm glad to have stuck with the classic.

And because I believe in fully extending holidays, we breakfasted the next day on fresh soymilk, made by a local soy foods company in Dorchester, which had a creamy and beany taste that was actually an enjoyable departure from my usual Vitasoy. I had a lot of fresh sweet soya curd when I was in Malaysia, but fresh soy milk was never on the menu, instead it was a canned drink that was loaded with sugar. It's something I remember loving a kid, but was likely best passed over (though I know an out of the way Indian market in Sullivan Square where you can actually get Yeo's Soy Drink...) for something fresh and whole like this, especially since the other element of breakfast was an indulgence, u char kway, a pastry whose name translates to something like "fried devils."

u char kway and fresh soymilk

These savory Chinese crullers were without a doubt a favorite wet (morning) market food for me. No doubt part of their charm was that they were made in a huge vat of hot oil and stirred with (not kidding) a man's extraordinarily long finger nails. Issues of sanitation regardless, I adored these things though they are little more than oily dough. I also have memories of eating u char kway in savory dishes with meat and greens , but when I was researching for the menu I couldn't find any mention of cooking with them that way, though apparently in Vietnamese cuisine they are sometimes used in pho, a popular rice-noodle dish. By next year I'll have tracked down the dish I'm remembering though and will be able to make it to welcome in the year of the earth ox...it's good to start filling in the menu early.

PS--You can click through on the hyperlinked titles under some of the photographs for recipes that I've posted on Flickr to keep the text looking manageable on this page.