No sooner had I published my Braised Pork Shoulder Article and Recipe than I came across a version done in the traditional style, with Pork Belly.

Happy days back then, but it is indeed correct that the traditional Pork Braised in Soy Sauce with Five Spice Powder, or Babi Kecap in Bahasa Indonesia, used pork belly.

I changed my recipe to use Pork Shoulder, albeit a fatty portion, out of guilt at the amount of fat in Pork Belly. Still, the writer makes a convincing argument that an occasional indulgence is OK.

What I especially like about her recipe is the inclusion of shiitake mushrooms. It adds a different texture to the dish, and rounds it off. An excellent idea that I will be adopting next time I cook this dish.

Last night I cooked my usual Pork Vindaloo, but thought I’d give it a bit of a tweak for a change.

Nothing dramatic, just cut back on the dried chillies from 20 to 12, and added 1 heaped teaspoon of Garam Masala.

It turned out quite nicely, mellower due to the reduction of the chillies and with a deeper flavour due to the addition of the Garam Masala.

 It will be interesting to see how it freezes (I froze 4 portions), as typically the chilli heat diminishes in the freezer and a richer flavour develops.

Time will tell.

Sometimes in your travels, you come across a great dish that you cannot forget. Trying to re-create it at home can be a challenge, but it is worth the effort.I first came across the dish on one of my regular business trips to Jakarta. Staying at a hotel that was popular with the locals and not tourists meant that the food there was pretty authentic. I quickly developed a selection of favourite dishes from the menu that became dinner must-haves.

One trip, I noticed the menu had changed and on it was Ikan Bakar Colo Colo. I decided to try it, and was struck by how simple it was and the great taste. They used a nice thick seabass fillet in that hotel, though they did say that restaurants outside would grill whole fish, rather than a single portion fillet. One of the things that made it special was the colo colo sauce, some call it a sambal, which because it was served in a small quantity, did not overwhelm the fish.

So, the dish went onto my list of must-haves. Some trips it was not so good, I suspect because the chef who got it onto the menu was the expert and if he was off, then another chefs efforts did not quite measure up.

Re-Creating The Recipe.

When I got back to Thailand, I searched the net and downloaded a recipe. I tried it as is, and it was a veritable disaster.

So, I had to content myself with having the dish whenever business took me to Jakarta. One day, waiting for a flight at an airport out in the provinces, I came across a cookbook at the airport bookstore. In it was a recipe for Ikan Bakar Colo Colo, so I bought the book on the spot.

Soon after, I tried the recipe as is. It was good, but not exactly what I had in the hotel. So, the next trip when I got to eat the dish, I made a careful comparison of ingredients and taste, to the best that one can tell by looking at and tasting the finished dish.

The difference came from the green chillies, which have a unique taste, addition of bird chillies which give a ‘kick’ to it, a little garlic and I believe the Indonesian kecap manis, or sweet soy sauce, which has a taste rather different from Chinese Sweet Soy Sauce.

And so, all set, I cooked the dish back in Thailand. It was wonderful!

As I no longer travel to Indonesia on business, I cannot readily get kecap manis, but I do intend to ask anyone who travels there to bring back a bottle.

Article / Recipe

It’s hard to get bored with food if you always tweak the recipes you use. I do that, even with my own creations. If the result is great, I’ll share it as an update, which is what I am doing today.

In May, I posted an article and recipe for Fusion Duck Curry. At the time I was eating the curry, I made a note that I would like to try it with the addition of curry leaves and garam masala.

Well, some time has passed and I was asked if I would cook the dish again. As I did that, I saw my note to try the variation. So I added 3 sprigs of curry leaves at the same time as the sliced onions, and ½ teaspoon garam masala together with the other spice powders. I also reduced the water to 1 cup, and reduced the heat to get the barest of simmers. Cooking time was the same.

It worked wonderfully, with a thicker, more flavourful gravy. Try it, you will not be disappointed I assure you.

Growing up in Kuala Lumpur in the ‘60s, we had a Sunday routine of Banana Leaf Cuisine for lunch. We’d take a 5-tier tiffin-carrier to the Ceylon Restaurant in Malay Street and buy the food there and take it home where we’d eat it.Fish, chicken, mutton or a different chicken preparation, 2 types of vegetables, and pappadum packed separately. The chicken was always Ceylonese Chicken Curry; that was the one thing that never changed, because it was such a fantastic tasting dish that the whole family loved it.

The Ceylon restaurant had two floors. On the ground floor, the centre section had long communal tables. At the sides and upstairs were smaller tables.

At meal times, people would come in and either sit at the long communal style tables or smaller tables. Without a word, a banana leaf would be put in front of the person, and a generous helping of rice dished out.

The waiter would then ask the customer if anything special was wanted, special meaning chicken, fish or meat or some such item. Meantime, another waiter would come with a multi-sectioned serving platter and dish out portions of 3 types of vegetables. This would be followed by the ‘gravy’ waiter who would come with this 3 sectioned container and offer a choice of fish curry gravy, chicken curry gravy or dhall. One of them would then return with any extra orders, and put down 2 or 3 pieces of pappadum.

Unless you made an order for the specials, it all came at a fixed price. For that price, you could ask for more rice and gravy if you wanted. Basically, you were guaranteed a full stomach at a fixed low price.

Fish would be sold by the piece, as would large kurma style or fried chicken pieces. Small chicken pieces like the Ceylonese Chicken Curry would be sold by the plate, a plate being a small saucer holding enough for a single portion.

The Ceylon Restaurant continued to be popular well into the ‘70s. Indeed, when I started work in Kuala Lumpur, Saturday lunch there was a routine.

Then I left Kuala Lumpur in the late ‘70s. When I went back sometime in the ‘80s (if my memory serves me correctly), the place was gone. Friends recommended other Banana Leaf restaurants. Whilst some of them were good, none had the very special Ceylonese Chicken Curry.

There were obviously people who knew how to cook it. The caterers at a friends wedding some years back served a pretty good version of it. So, I experimented with several recipes, made a few tweaks and came up with the one on my site.

As usual, I continue to experiment, and am considering increasing the quantities of coriander seeds, among other things.

I have a recipe on my site for Roasted Tomato Soup that is quite excellent. The roasting concentrates the flavours nicely.Last night, I decided to do a variation of it. Instead of using just tomatoes, I reduced the tomatoes to 3, and added 1 carrot.

Roasting was the same as in the recipe. I peeled and chopped the carrot into 3 cm (1 inch plus) chunks, and roasted together with the tomatoes and garlic.

After roasting, when chopping the tomatoes, I also chopped the carrot into smaller pieces, about 1 cm (½ inch).

Then instead of cooking the mix first, and adding sugar, balsamic vinegar and flour before adding stock, I added the sugar, balsamic vinegar and flour, mixed it in and then poured it all into the heated stock. This saved me washing 1 extra pot, which I would have used had I heated the stock separately.

Taste was great, so it is a variation that works well.

If anyone needs any proof that a recipe is but a guide, go to allrecipes.com and check out the offerings. You will get a mind boggling choice, many for basically the same recipe, but with an individual twist that makes each a little different. Variation is something I am very much in favour of; and innovation. If you read my article “Frittata, Any Way You Like It”, you will see that whilst I provide 1 simple recipe to accompany the article, I suggest many options to change the recipe.

Do experiment, and change around as you see fit. The original recipe for Frittata was nothing at all like what I have posted. I followed that original recipe exactly once - just to get a feel of putting the dish together.

Thereafter, I kept changing and adding ingredients as the mood struck me. Every time I added something, it enhanced the flavours. If I left it out the next time, invariably I would get the question “Why didn’t you put in xxx this time?” A sure sign that ‘xxx’ was well received.

So, read the article, copy the recipe, and unleash your creative instincts.

Do you tend to use a lot of salt when you cook?

I don’t, not for any reason other than I have become used to using small amounts of salt. So you will find that my recipes seldom, if ever, state how much salt you should use. I happen to think that this is a matter of personal taste.

Having said that, there is a common belief that potatoes absorb salt very readily. Well, that really depends on how you cook them. If you boil peeled potatoes, expect them to absorb quite a bit of salt. This is why you are asked to salt the water you boil them in - do not salt and you get pretty bland tasting potatoes.

But if you sauté the potatoes in olive oil, like I did for the recipe “Mushroom Omelette with Sautéed Potatoes” on ChefPla.com, then do be careful when you season them - especially if you dislike salty food. You will find the salt is not really absorbed, but tends to stay on the surface of the potatoes. Add too much and you will have something that tastes like over-salted French fries.

If in doubt, leave the salting to the individual at the table. If salt is going to stay on the surface, it really does not matter whether you add it while cooking, or at the table.

After I posted the recipe for Wiener Schnitzel (with Pork) on ChefPla.com, I realised that I had not taken a photograph of the finished dish the last time I cooked it.

No matter, I cooked it again last night, took the photographs and we then proceeded to have it for dinner. With potato salad, green salad and a squeeze of lemon juice, it was lovely. And so easy to prepare.

For photography enthusiasts, I use the elinchrom d-lite 2 studio set, Nikon D200, Nikon SB-800 speedlight as master unit, and an AF Micro Nikkor 60mm lens.

Easy setup and easy to use, which suits me fine as I have to be a jack of all trades with this website.

Wiener Schnitzel (Pork) Photograph

A famous dish for both Malaysia and Indonesia is Rendang, made from either beef or chicken. There are more beef recipes though, every state in Malaysia having its own take or three on this. So too the ubiquitous beef curry.

Being traditional dishes, the recipes usually call for “Beef”. No mention of cut, because when these dishes were created, beef in Asia was sold in local wet markets without distinguishing the cut. Just an assortment of slabs of meat on the table and you pointed to where you wanted the cut based primarily on how lean you wanted it to be, presence or absence of sinew and tendon, the colour, and of course how much you were willing to pay.

But today, with supermarkets packaging or butchering by cut, it makes sense to be a bit more discerning. I have started using top round for rendangs and beef curries. In both cases, a long simmer allows the top round cut to become really tender.

The bonus? Top (and bottom) round have a fuller flavour than loin cuts or rib cuts. You taste it very distinctly, and the spices you have used in the dish do not completely overwhelm the meat.

Try it and see, you’ll love it.

Indonesian Beef Rendang - Article + Recipe