Penang Loh Bak and Popiah

Preparing for a Penang Fest for a client who's having a house party this weekend. The usual stuff is being hauled up. Our specialty items - Penang Loh Bak and Popiah spreads. Spent most of this afternoon slicing the turnip (or Bang Kwang) and cutting the carrots into little slivers. We have to ensure that all the vegetables that's going into the Popiah veggie mix is thinly sliced, with probably close to surgical precission.

What's so special about Popiah, it's probably one of the healthier dishes around. It's a mixture of this cooked turnip and carrots, with some slivers of pork and shrimp, wrapped with more vegetables - the chinese lettuce, chinese parsley, blanched bean sprouts, blanched shrimp, hardboiled egg, chinese sausage and fried shallots wrapped up like a burrito. You can call it the Penang Burrito, or the Peranakan Burrito. Anyway you call it...however you eat it. It's delicious.

You can keep it nice and juicy by not squeezing out too much of the juice of the turnip mixture, and putting more sauce - like the sweet flour sauce, our famous balachan chilli etc. Just thinking about it, I better prepare a little more, so that I can have our famous burrito for dinner tomorrow.

Penang Loh Bak (aka Ngoh Hiang or five-spice roll)

Penang Loh Bak is different from some of the Ngoh Hiang that you get to eat in Peranakan resteraunts cross Malaysia and Singapore. The Ngoh Hiang that many of them make includes a mixture of meat, waterchestnut and spices, rolled up in a beancurd skin, then deep fried till the skin is crispy and served with sweet sauce.

Penang Loh Bak is different, as it's only thinly sliced pork seasoned with 5 spice powder (and Penang makes really good fragrant five spice powder, actually I would like to say the Best five spice powder in the whole of asia), and chopped onion. Fairly simple right? Wrong, preparing the Loh Bak is easy, it's problematic when it comes to frying the rolls. We do not deep fry it like we do for the other styles. This one, we have to shallow fry it for a longer period of time, this way, we get the onions in the beancurd roll caramalized in the roll itself. This gives the meatroll a natural sweetness, and coupled with the sweetness of the spices, it's a unaparalleled combination.