Mindful that I will be leaving KL at the end of the year, and will be cut off from my new favourite foods, I put out a plea on the local residents Facebook page –
I got a few suggestions for using salted egg powder instead of the real thing, which just wouldn’t be the same at all – a bit like asking for authentic pasta recipes and someone suggesting that you open a tin of Heinz spaghetti hoops. But then I got a reply from a young cook who’s running a pop-up restaurant on the site of a former car wash, and he offered to teach me.
So off I went, with my notebook and my phone, ready to learn the secrets of salted egg.
When I arrived, he’d got the ingredients all ready, like a cookery demonstration, and we were away –
– the dish we were making was salted egg butter chicken.
Unfortunately, I have a real problem with chillis, and as soon as anyone starts frying them, there’s some irritant released which makes me cough uncontrollably – so I had to have my cookery lesson in a mask.
It was a bit embarrassing, but I’m sure I can’t be the only sufferer, as he had a whole box of masks in his kitchen.
We made a delicious sauce, and then added the all-important salted egg –
Whoever would have thought that such an unprepossessing-looking ingredient transform any meal into paradise on a plate?
I learnt that the all-important ingredients for making crispy fried chicken is wheatstarch, not cornstarch – and here it is in all it’s glorious, golden crispness –
along with the salted egg butter sauce –
absolutely delicious – thanks, Razali!
Am now planning to build a salted egg empire when I return to the UK, and I predict that it will be the big food craze of 2019. Let’s hope I’m more accurate than Nostradamus.