Malaysian Recipes
12 recipes found
Laksa
While chicken curry laksa is a popular restaurant dish across Southeast Asia, making it at home is entirely doable. It’s as simple as blending a spice paste, cooking it off and poaching some chicken thighs. It gets its complexity from rempah, a fragrant spice paste made with ingredients such as lemongrass and galangal (which can be swapped for ginger). This recipe calls for making your own rempah, but to save time, you can buy a good-quality paste and enhance it with fresh lemongrass, ginger and garlic (see Tip 2). The coconut milk-based broth is spicy, savory and rich, but not heavy, based on the curry laksa found at hawker centers in Malaysia and Singapore. The flavor improves over time, so it’s a dish worth making in advance.
Nasi Lemak
Nasi lemak is the name of a Southeast Asian coconut rice that’s fragrant with lemongrass, pandan leaves, ginger, galangal and spices, though sometimes you’ll see it referring to a meal that includes ikan bilis (crispy fried dried anchovies with peanuts), hard-boiled eggs, sliced cucumbers and sambal oelek. The latter presentation of nasi lemak, which is the recipe that follows, is common in Malaysia and Singapore, according to Zulfikar Fahd, the chef and owner of Java Bali Kitchen, an Indonesian pop-up restaurant in Toronto. A more Indonesian iteration might pair nasi lemak with chicken, sweet tempeh or an omelet. All of which is to say that this gorgeous, easy coconut rice will perfume your home and be a wonderful anchor to your meal.
Fried Crab Stick Crackers
Lay down your Lay’s, and put down your Pringles, because deep-fried crab stick crackers are the newest and bestest snack in town.
Yi Jun Loh’s One-Pot Coconut Water ABC Soup
This coconut water soup recipe is the Malaysian version of the classic simple chicken soup. Adapted very slightly from Yi Jun Loh of the blog Jun & Tonic.
Malaysian-Style Ginger-Chile Crab
Steamed crabs are great. But this recipe takes them a step further, into the luxurious, spicy territory of Malaysia, where the cooked crabs are sautéed fiercely with an enormous amount of chopped ginger and chiles, garlic and curry powder before you serve them under a spray of sliced scallions. Eat with your hands. All but the most fastidious eaters should consider wearing a bib.
Spicy Fried Fish Balls
While eating in Kuala Lumpur food stalls, Zak Pelaccio, chef of Fatty Crab and 5 Ninth restaurants in Manhattan, first tried otak-otak, an intense, spicy mackerel paste. Although in Malaysia you’d usually find otak-otak steamed, he rolls it into balls and deep-fries them as a cocktail snack for 230 Fifth, a rooftop bar where he consults on the menu.
Kaya Toast
In Malay, kaya translates to rich, which perfectly describes this toasted bread spread with custardy kaya jam and cold salted butter. Kaya toast is popular throughout Malaysia, Singapore and other regions of Southeast Asia where pandan, the star ingredient, grows as a tropical plant with palm-like leaves. Kaya jam is made with fresh pandan, coconut milk, palm sugar and lots of eggs, which make it creamy. In this version, adapted from Kyo Pang, the founder and the executive chef of New York City’s Kopitiam, milk bread slices sandwiching kaya jam come with soy-seasoned half-boiled eggs for dipping.
Pork Belly Tea Sandwiches
These sandwiches are not dainty pinkie-in-the-air nibbles, but hefty pork belly tea sandwiches that cater to hearty appetites and cold beer. Zak Pelaccio, the chef and an owner of Fatty Crab, a Malaysian street food cafe on the edge of the meatpacking district, got the idea for them from the afternoon English tea services he enjoyed when he lived in Malaysia. With each bite the sandwiches offer richness, salt and spice, the components that make game day food so satisfying. Southeast Asian chili sauce, two kinds of soy sauce and streaky pork fat heighten the taste. And they are a cinch to make. Just marinate, braise then pile the meat onto big slices of dense supermarket white bread that have been slathered with spicy mayonnaise. They can be made in advance and wrapped and refrigerated for a couple of hours before serving.
Malaysian Chicken Wings
Mark Miller's Fruit And Chili Mole
Chicken Curry
