Wild (Mushroom) Sunday

cold drip coffee

 It was a wild (mushroom) Sunday. We had trundled off in the April showers, to Shah Alam, Selangor, just outside of Kuala Lumpur. Our friends had invited us to try their family's specialist coffee and bakery 'bistro' aptly named Brew&Bake. It was conveniently sandwiched between a multitude of 'local' restaurants and ‘kopitiams' (Malaysian Chinese style coffee houses).

Brew&Bake roast their own coffee beans. Some beans are Indonesian, some coffee beans are from Central America (Brazil). Brew&Bake’s vaguely impressive coffee roaster sits in a small, glass partitioned, room fragranced with delicious coffee aromas. A handsome, impressively polite and well-groomed nephew accompanied his father in explaining the roasting process, and pointed to their Dutch coffee roasting machine.

We were also pointed (literally) to the cold drip coffee filter where, surprisingly enough, cold coffee dripped achingly slowly into a glass container. In England cold coffee would have been sent back to the kitchen, but in these equatorial climes cold coffee was all the rage. Cold drip or cold brew coffee is also known as Dutch coffee where coffee beans are soaked in water for 12 to 18 hours. The cold dripping lowers the coffee’s acidity. The owner, Pua Kim Guan, insisted that the result was a deluxe coffee, with a distinctly whiskey taste. The cold coffee was high octane caffeine fuelled, black and decidedly precious looking, but whiskey it wasn't. It was a hit, but a kid glove tap compared to some, and pleasant enough drunk without unnecessary additives - milk or sugar. I forewent the obligatory ice and would have preferred a more robust coffee taste.

the coffee

A credibly creamy soup was delicately flavoured with wild mushroom, while our Waldorf (poached) Egg sat atop yet more wild mushrooms and was dribbled with Hollandaise sauce (a la Eggs Benedict). Some, of course, say that the sauce should be brown mushroom sauce if it were to follow the 1918 recipe for Eggs Waldorf, but it was Malaysia, the equator, not New York. 

It was a surfeit of snacks and myriad coffee followed by a non-alcoholic tiramisu, and yes there is such a thing, sadly, in the nether lands of this politically, racially and religiously confused country. The total tiramisu was tasty enough but it was, as my British contemporaries might say, all mouth and no trousers without the alcohol.

I was overtly over-snacked at Brew&Bake, but some of our party were still hankering for some more traditional Malaysia fare. We wandered along to try Mr Pua's other restaurant in the area, Kheng’s Kopitiam (named after his wife’s family), which was but a few steps along the same covered walkway. There they, not I, gorged on Nasi Lemak, Rendang, noodles and a whole host of authentic 'kopitiam' food, drink and desserts. All hints of wildness, wildlings and wildernesses were over, as we all became satisfyingly satiated and therefore timely tamed.