Twelve and a half years ago* at The Grace Hotel, Sydney, I ran a series of Malaysian cooking masterclasses, each week focusing on a different theme.
On the week I did Nyonya cuisine, a food brand came forward to sponsor some of the ingredients we would be using in our cooking session. Never one to say no the freebies, I happily accepted their offer.
One of the dishes we were tackling in that session was Penang Asam Laksa, which I used to sell as an occasional special at my restaurant. And one of the ingredients in my asam laksa recipe was tamarind concentrate. I used to buy this in bulk for my restaurant – a specific version from Thailand.
The food brand offered their version of tamarind concentrate and the students in my class used it like-for-like in the recipe. As it turned out, their tamarind was much more concentrated than what I usually used, so everyone’s asam laksa ended up too sour. We tried to fix it with mixed success. And yes, I take full responsibility for the stuff-up.
The point of this story is not to say that any particular brand of an Asian ingredient is superior to another, but rather that if you’re going to be following my recipes, developed by me (unlike, ahem, in the case of some bestselling cookbook authors), you need to be on the same page as me when working out exactly what iteration of an ingredient I’m talking about.
This is why I created a really basic PDF called the Malaysian Pantry Decoder – I compiled it for participants of my Malaysian Hawker Pro coaching programme so they knew what to look for when shopping for ingredients for the six restaurant-level dishes they would be tackling in the programme.
Then I figured everyone else who follows my recipes (which I’ve been sharing online for 15+ years) could benefit from it as well, so if you want to grab your copy, you can do so here – Malaysian Pantry Decoder.
It’s meant to give you a visual guide to the types of ingredients I commonly use, along with the brands I prefer (in some, not all cases) – since if you’re Asian you’ll know that no two soya sauces or oyster sauces are identical.
So next time you attempt my recipes here on my website and on YouTube etc., you can use it as a point of reference, and not blame me if your asam laksa is too sour or not sour enough.
If nothing else, it might open your eyes to the possibilities next time you visit an Asian grocery store (esp. the freezer section) for ingredients you might not have considered using in Malaysian cooking.
I’m going to dive further into some of these ingredient/brand choices in follow-up emails I send to my list, so you can make sense of why I use them as opposed to other stuff that might be more “conventional”.
By the way, if you’ve been sitting on the sidelines re: Malaysian Hawker Pro, where you get to master 6 dishes from my restaurant menu with personal virtual coaching from me, I’m gearing up for my next intake. If you want to skip the queue (because the price will be going up), drop me a line I’ll send you the details along with the current pricing.
Jackie M.
Photo from our Grace Hotel cooking class – and by the way, I know it was twelve and a half years ago because Noah was seven months old and still in Westmead Hospital, getting ready to finally come home after multiple operations etc.
The post Malaysian Pantry Decoder first appeared on Jackie M..
The post Malaysian Pantry Decoder appeared first on Jackie M..
