April 26th (2020)

 

April 26th
Awoke at 5.50am

This morning is devoted to the search for ingredients and the making of Bak Kuet Teh in the tiny, under the stairs ‘kitchen’, here at Colors of Cambodia.

Bak Kuet Teh is a Chinese Malaysian pork bone soup. Though Singapore also lays claim to it. Bak Kuet Teh‘s origins remain unclear, but Malaysians believe it to be a meat bone herb  soup, originated in Klang, amongst the Hokkien immigrants. The key ingredients tend to be a combination of various herbs and spices plus light and dark soy sauces. My version is a variation on this, including dried chillies.

8am
Phany has arrived, as planned, and we walk through the alleyways to the Old Market. It makes such a difference having Phany with me to barter the prices down. I must say though, the meat and veg look very fresh, especially the pork (and there was a lot) and the beef stalls too. I miss this in Malaysia. With Phany’s help I manage to get pork ribs and a nice pork bone, both of which are chopped to my requirements there and then.

Hunting for the mushrooms is a little more complex, as we go to three different stalls to get three different types of mushroom. There is dried Shitake Mushrooms, which are a little larger than I really want, but okay. Then Nioki Mushrooms, which I buy ready packed, a little too much for my requirements, but we can manage, and Straw Mushrooms which are four times the size of the canned ones. I get those because the stalls do not have fresh Shitake. All in all okay, but no Smoked Garlic either, which is a pity as Smoked Garlic beefs up the taste.

Cooking. It takes somewhere between two to three hours. One of the Bak Kuet Teh spice sachets claimed it could cook in thirty five minutes, this I very much doubt. I use two different sachets, from different companies, because neither has exactly what I want. The two together, plus the addition of Dark Soy, Light Soy, Oyster Sauce, pan seared garlic, dried mushrooms and chillies help the taste. Soon I will add the Straw Mushrooms and last of all the Nioki.

This will be served with Yóu Tiáo (yau cha guai) or deep fried long donuts, and a dish of Light Soy and clear vinegar, mixed with freshly chopped chilli and garlic.

Yóu Tiáo, more usually is a Chinese breakfast dish. I first had this in Malaysia, where someone served it to me with Chicken Curry. It has been a favourite of mine ever since. There is a legend, that in ancient China, one Prime Minister Qin, was so hated for betraying his country that a dough maker rolled out two sticks of dough, representing Qin and his wife, stuck them together and deep fried the result. To add to the ‘punishment’ of Qin, family, relatives and friends were invited to eat the fried dough. A sort of sympathetic magic. The fried dough was so tasty that the idea caught on.

Yóu Tiáo is dough made from flour, water, sugar, salt, and baking soda in pairs. The lightly salted sticks of dough are joined together in the middle and fried in vegetable oil, so that the dough becomes puffy and crispy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside.

Having just finished my bowl of meat bone soup - wow, that was tasty, even though I do say so myself. It is, quite possibly, the best Bak Kuet Teh I have made yet. In the end it did take three hours to made, and five minutes to eat.

Supper is brought up in a bowl containing de-seeded jackfruit and leaf wrapped parcels of bean rice. Those ‘parcels’ remind me of the Malaysian/Indonesian ‘Ketupat’.

Today’s spend
$10 on pork bones, large and ribs.
$2 on mushrooms and garlic.
$2 Laundry

Total $14