A Cultural Feast – or Malaysian Food for Dummies
by Deborah Brand Probst
“North of Bali, south of Bangkok,” I say. When I was growing up I had no idea that most people in the world did not know where Malaysia is located. Still to this day I describe it as a place between other places. “Right next to Singapore! I declare after Crazy Rich Asians came out. “In fact Singapore used to be part of Malaysia.” “What is the language like?” they ask. “Something like a cross between Spanish and Tagalog?” I try meekly, hoping that they know what Tagalog sounds like. And then they inevitably ask about the food. Oh dear. This is where I struggle the most. Thank goodness for Anthony Bourdain who has single handedly put Malaysia as a culinary destination on the map. And yet I am still asked. “What is a typical Malaysian dish?” They are expecting an answer. And it’s going to be a long one.
First it starts with a geography lesson. “Malaysia is made up of a peninsula that is attached to the Thailand and is the very tip of the Asian continent in Southeast Asia. It is also made up of thousands of tiny islands and one big one called Borneo. Borneo happens to be the third largest island in the world and also happens to be where I am from.” I think I lost them by now but I bravely proceed. “That island is shared by three countries – Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia.” Most definitely lost them. “Umm, that’s where Anthony Bourdain drank rice whiskey with all the natives and got his hand done tattoo!” They are paying attention again.
Then I go into a short infomercial, just to hold their interest, about beaches and islands and resorts.
We are from Everywhere
Then I go into, gulp, a history lesson. “It was a British Colony,” I say. But before that it was part of the famous spice route so wave after wave of European settlers came through including the Dutch and the Portuguese.” I press on. “The Southern Chinese from Canton migrated down for the opportunity, the British brought waves of Indian labor, and the Proto-Malays migrated from Indonesia. The indigenous people were Negritos who have lived in Malaysia for thousands of years and bear more of a resemblance to New Zealand’s Maori’s, Australian Aborigines, or New Guineans then todays Asians. They are thought to have migrated from Africa thousands of years ago” I better stop here I say to myself.
Ok but what does all of this have to do with food? If you come from a land rich with spices, surrounded by water, and with a thousand years of migration from all over the world, the cuisine becomes the melting pot. One of the things I miss the most about Malaysia are the night markets. The day cools down, the breeze intensifies and everyone who was hiding out in the air conditioning in the heat of the day, now comes out to play. It is part flea market, part festival, part outdoor food court. You stay for hours and you eat your way across the market little by little. And the food is every imaginable style of Malaysian food.
There is a Malaysian dish called “Nasi Campur” which literally translates to “mixed rice.” Indonesians would say its an Indonesian dish. This happens a lot but anyway, I will proceed. It is a dish that has no recipe. It is just rice with a protein, and a vegetable. And it is made a million different ways. Here in lies the problem with Malaysian food. Even after I tell you about one dish. I have to tell you about all the variations people from all over Malaysia make it. For a relatively small country, there are so many variations of people and regional cooking. So I will attempt to give you my version of Malaysian Food for Dummies.
Top 10 Malaysian Dishes
“Malaysian food is one of the great culinary melting pots of the world. It’s a feast for the senses”
Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain filmed 5 times in Malaysia and he ate his way all through the country, most of the time on the street. He was a big fan and did a more eloquent job of describing the food than I ever could. But since I can’t make everyone who asks me these questions just sit down and watch the 5 episodes, I have to make the valiant attempt myself. I describe it once again with identifying other foods that people find familiar. “It is a cross between Chinese and Indian,” I say. But spicier. Everything needs to be boiled down to a list so that it can be understood so I will try to list the Top 10 Malaysian dishes.
1. Nasi Lemak – This the national dish of Malaysia. It is a fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaves, and it is served with a variety of side dishes, such as chicken or beef curry, peanuts, hard-boiled egg, sambal and ikan bilis – a small fish similar to an anchovy that is fried. It is typically eaten for breakfast. The whole thing is wrapped in the pandan leaf and can be easily transported.
2. Laksa – A spicy coconut milk noodle soup with a few variations but the most common ones are curry laksa and assam laksa. Curry laksa is made with a thicker curry broth, while assam laksa is made with a sour and spicy broth, typically seafood based. The sourness comes from a blend of tamarind paste and fresh lime juice which gives it a tart flavor offsetting the richness of the coconut milk and the spiciness of the chillis.
3. Satay is the quintessential street food. They are grilled skewers of meat that are marinated in a blend of spices. The most common types of satay in Malaysia are chicken satay, beef satay, and mutton satay. You can find these everywhere but my fondest memories of eating these when I was growing up, is on the beach. We would buy 10 sticks at a time from the satay vendor who would walk around and sell these all along the shore, going back to the grill and replenishing when he ran out.
4. Char Kway Teow is a stir-fried noodle dish that is made with flat rice noodles, shrimp, eggs, bean sprouts, and Chinese sausage. It is cooked in a large wok, traditionally over a charcoal fire at a very high temperature. These days, most of the vendors use a gas stove. I canot even begin to describe the how all the textures come together in this dish.
The noodles are soft and springy, the prawns, sweet and also springy, the bean sprouts, cold and crisp, the chinese sausage, little morsels of fat and sweetness and lastly intermingled in all of that, a scramble egg. Of course like any Malaysian dish these are not all the ingredients. This is best eaten outdoors on the street.
5. Bah Kuh Teh is a pork rib dish that is the most boring looking dish that somehow tastes divine. The name literally translates from the Hokkien dialect as “meat bone tea”, and at its simplest, consists of pork ribs simmered in a broth of herbs and spices for hours. Despite its name, there is in fact no tea in the dish itself; the name refers to a strong oolong Chinese tea which is usually served alongside the soup in the belief that it dilutes or dissolves the copious amount of fat consumed in this pork-laden dish.
Bak kut teh is believed to have originated in Klang, Malaysia, in the early 1900s. It was created by Teochew immigrants who combined their own traditional herbal soup with Chinese medicinal ingredients.
6. Chicken Rice is yet another incredibly boring looking dish. Simply described it is poached chicken and seasoned rice, served with chilli sauce and usually with cucumber garnishes. It was created by immigrants from Hainan in southern China and adapted from the Hainanese dish Wenchang chicken. The rice is cooked in chicken broth and chicken fat, which gives it a rich flavor. The rice is so flavorful when done correctly you can literally just eat the plain rice and be completely content. The chicken is poached until it is cooked through, but still buttery moist and tender. It is typically served at room temp with a piping hot bowl of the broth that was made from the chicken.
The dish is often served with a dipping sauce made from chili peppers, garlic, and vinegar. This has become comfort food for Mark even though he didn’t grow up eating this. He can literally eat this dish every single day.
7. Chicken Curry. I am including this because it is a personal favorite of mine. Malaysian chicken curry does not taste like Thai, Indian, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese or any other curry. It is exactly in the middle of all the others. First, it is typically made with a blend of Malay, Indian, and Chinese spices. This gives it a unique flavor that is not found in other curries.
Second, Malaysian chicken curry is often cooked with coconut milk, which gives it a creamy and rich texture. lemongrass, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves. It takes a very long time to get this all blended, toasted, and perfect. The creaminess of the chicken curry comes with large wedges of potatoes that breakdown in the stew giving it the desired thickness. It is best eaten the second day. This is the only dish that I cannot stop eating and will inevitably over eat.
8. Ikan Bakar literally means “burn fish” It is typically a whole fish marinated with a mixture of sweet soy sauce and coconut oil, wrapped with a banana leaf and grilled over a charcoal fire. The spice mixture may vary, but usually it consists of a combination of ground shallot, garlic, chili pepper, coriander, tamarind juice, candlenut, turmeric, galangal and salt.
9. Rendang is usually a special occasion food. It is made with beef that is marinated in a blend of spices, including turmeric, ginger, garlic, chili peppers, and coriander. The meat is then cooked in coconut milk over low heat for several hours, until it is tender and falling apart. The slow cooking process helps to tenderize the meat and infuse it with the flavors of the spices. The result is a dish that is both flavorful and satisfying. Rendang has a rich and savory flavor, with a hint of sweetness from the coconut milk. The chili peppers give the dish a bit of heat, but it is not too spicy. The spices also give the dish a complex and nuanced flavor. Similar to the idea of the Italian spaghetti sauce, no two people make this dish in the same way.
10. Ais Kacang means “ice nut” in Malay and is a shaved ice and milk dessert that is piled high with a rainbow of ingredients such as red beans, peanuts, jelly, grass jelly, and fruit, then flavored with gula melaka syrup, which is palm sugar, a mildly sweet caramel flavor. On a hot day, which is everyday in Malaysia, I can eat this for lunch and be perfectly content. But you must eat it quickly before it melts into a river of color which you slurp up with a spoon.
Have You Eaten?
“Sudah makan?” the Uber driver says to mother and I as we climb into the car. This is a common greeting in Malaysia. It means, “Have you eaten?” When people ask me what is there to do in Malaysia, I tell them “Eat.” There are 878 islands and thousands of baby powder white sand beaches with crystal clear water that are no where near as over run as Bali, Koh Phi Phi or any of the other South East Asian Islands. There are 1.3 million square miles of rain forest in Malaysia, the third largest in the world after the Amazon and the Congo. It is home to orangutans, tigers, elephants, and rhinoceroses and 286,000 unique species of animals and plants.
In his book Ghost of the Sea Turtle, Cousteau wrote that Malaysia was “one of the last places on Earth where you can still find untouched rainforests.” He was particularly impressed by the diversity of life in the rainforests, and he wrote that “it is as if the entire animal kingdom had gathered here.“ But our national identity is in our food.
My husband Mark and I now spend a lot of time in Italy as well as Malaysia and he recently made the interesting observation that Italians talk about food almost as much as Malaysians. He has observed the phenomenon of my extended family planning lunch while we are eating breakfast and discussing what we are doing for dinner while we have lunch. It is an obsession. It is also what fuels me to seek out markets in foreign countries, to cook with ingredients that I have never seen, to always order something on the menu if I have never seen it before. We live to eat and we want to feed the world.
