October 14, 2020 In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Sweets

Brûlée Coconut, Palm Sugar, Pork floss sticky buns

"  It's savoury-sweet kinda thing, you know, obviously, but also smokey around where a mixed aroma of coconut, butterscotch and bacon meet and greet.  " [ezcol_2third] What in the world is pork floss?! And where the hell do you get palm sugar?!  Or both, for that matter?! Ok fine, so I knew this is gonna be a hard pitch.  And I'm probably not helping my case when I tell you that pork floss, invented by an anonymous Chinese likely on a night of massive insomnia, is a brownish cotton ball made of predominantly pork, which is cooked, shredded, then painstakingly dehydrated while being tumble-fried inside a wok until what used to be muscle tissues have then transformed into super fine, fiber-like fluffs.  Whaaat?!  And as if that's not mind-bending enough, its flavor profile wonders in between savoury and sweet with a maple bacon or jerky-like porkiness oozing into your sensory space as your mouth grapple to understand this textural anomaly. It's really just like any other culinary ingenuities that took form initially as a means to tackle food preservation before refrigeration, but ended up being cherished by its culture even till this day.  Stretching from southern China down to Southeast Asia, hey, pork floss matters. 

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December 2, 2013 In All recipes, Meat, Vegatables

ANDY WRECKER GREEN CURRY MEATBALLS

Let's all be honest here. Yes. Including those of us who say we love to cook, and would ferociously defend the legitimacy of home-making Turkish kofta platter, Taiwanese gua bao, or even Italian duck prosciutto, once in a blue moon at least, let's not kid ourselves. In practicality, the song and dance of travelling to exotic and exhilarating corners of the world through a dialogue in our own kitchen is, most of the time, only romantic in theory. At the end of the day, if you are any lucky, the flaming urge for such adventures mostly gets put out by a take-out menu amidst a stack of its own kind, that quietly settles in a kitchen drawer with can-openers and plumber-contacts. Authentic, or not authentic. Good, or no good. Doesn't matter. That's what normal people do. I used to be normal. Yes. I used to be normal in the sense that I too, raised healthy curiosity for all things exotic and delicious, which perhaps could even develop into a moderate ambition to dissect and tackle in my own kitchen. Perfectly normal and harmless because ultimately, just like any other sanity-abiding citizens,

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