Veronica: Malaysian cuisine is extremely diverse and bursting with intense flavor. Hi! I am Veronica with WatchMojo.com. And today, we have a chance to speak with Chef Nantha and he’s going to take us through the steps and processes to making it an authentic Malaysian meal. So to begin with, can you tell us about Malaysian food is?
Chef Nantha: It is fusion and its true sense because Malaysian cuisine comprises of three main groups, we have the Chinese; we have the Malay which is the indigenous people of Malaysia, they eat very simple food. That’s what we’ll be doing today, and South Indian cooking.
Veronica: So, can you tell us what we are looking at here?
Chef Nantha: This is water convolvulus. It’s a weedj and it grows on water. It just floats because it is hallow. I use quail eggs because they are cuter. This is the boiled one. This is Ikan Bilis where you soak it overnight if you want. This is the magic ingredient here, the shrimp paste; it adds a smoky flavor to the sambal. The sambal is basically onion, ginger, garlic and dried chili.
Veronica: Can we head over to the kitchen and where you can show us how it is done?
Chef Nantha: Sure. That’s already made there. We are going to do it for you. Now, this is a trick, it’s all going to be blended together anyway. There we go, equal portions of onion, equal portions of garlic and equal portions of ginger. Add a little bit of water.
With the shrimp paste, if it is moist, just take a couple of pieces like that and you just dry it off like that on the stove. Here is the sambal. A little bit of oil. The shrimp paste is goes in, after that, the contents of the blender goes in, we got tamarind juice, a little bit of salt and we’ll finish it out with a little bit of sugar and that’s done.
This is the Nasi Lemak, this is the coconut rice that we’re going to make. Put a little bit of turmeric. This is enough to color it, a couple of cumin seeds, a little bit of salt.
So, after that, we add the coconut milk. You want the rice to taste like coconut so you can use the whole can if you want. To be health conscious, we will just use half of that. You wait for it to come to a boil. Once it comes to a boil, put cover on.
This the way they seal rice in a Nasi Lemak. This is the way they seal it, they put a little bit of the sambal on top. Ikan bilis, you can use regular eggs if you want, just quarter them over, over, wrap and wrap. The idea of leaving it open is we know what is inside whether it is a meat, whether if it’s like a sardine or it’s just egg, you know.
Veronica: So now that it’s all done, how do we enjoy it?
Chef Nantha: We enjoy it by eating it. So we got some veggies here, grilled fish. We use the sambal, the same thing. This one was fried. When we eat it with cucumber, that will cut away the spices. In fact, we have to eat with our fingers, wash it first. And so you take the sambal in the middle and you try mix it up with as much rice as possible or depending on how spicy you want it.
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