For Valentine’s Day we decided to take a Malay cooking class. We booked with Lazat Cooking. It started at 8am at a wet market. Wet markets sell fresh meat and produce. First we had breakfast consisting of roti canai and some curry sauces, with tea. Roti canai is a thin bread they make by spinning and tossing a little bit similar to pizza, then when it is very thin it is cooked quickly on a hot plate. After breakfast we had a tour of the market and learned about the history and uses of various fish and produce. Our group consisted of Mike (also from Toronto, but now lives in Portland), and a couple from the UK with their 10 year old daughter. It was a good group.
Our guide said the most important person in the market is the “paste lady”. The paste lady makes the fresh pastes for curries. During the cooking class we would find out why the paste lady is call a Malay woman’s best friend. The paste lady at this market was ranked #1 in Kuala Lumpur and actually runs a factory that makes popular pastes, but she keeps this market stall open because it has been in her family for so long. She is the silver haired woman in the middle of the photo below.
After the market we headed to the cooking class. The first thing we made was called Otak-otak, which is fish in a spice paste steamed in a banana leaf. We made the spice paste the traditional way, with a mortar and pestle. The spice paste was made of lemon grass, turmeric, ginger, garlic, galangal (similar to ginger), red chili, shallots and candle nuts, all fresh. These are pounded and ground together until they are a paste. It is quite an arduous task, which is why most people prefer to buy their spice and curry pastes from the paste lady.
Once it was finally a paste, we mixed it with an egg and a few other ingredients, then added the fish, and wrapped in banana leaves, and steamed.
It was quite good. Not that spicy even though it had a chili in it. They told us Malay food tends to be lest spicy than Thai and some other cuisines. Technically we are cooking Nyonya cuisine, which is a mix of Malay and Chinese created when Some Chinese immigrated to Malaysia about 500 years ago. They have seven flavors and every dish is supposed to have some element of each. They are sweet, sour, bitter, salty, savory, fragrant and creamy.
For our main course we made chicken curry and roti jala. Since the curry takes a while to cook and infuse the flavors throughout the dish, we made Onde Onde for desert while we waited. It is basically dough wrapped around palm sugar, then boiled and coated with shredded coconut.
After that the roti jala, or lace pancake.
Everything was delicious. Although Yanmei said if we make it at home, we’ll use a blender instead of mortar and pestle, and I agree!
By the time we got home it was only 2:30, but we were pretty exhausted. It also started raining in the afternoon, so we mostly rested for the rest of the day.
David