learning to speak malaysian food

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09.01.2009

learning to speak malaysian food

Last week I attended a Malaysian cooking class, where we fried a lot of things: won tons, spring rolls, and pie tees. The first two items were pretty familiar. Whenever I’m craving comfort food, I love a good dumpling, like won ton soup orjiaozi. Spring rolls are also comforting to me, having evolved into one of our traditional holiday foods about 5 years ago, when my family started deep-frying our turkeys at Thanksgiving. It’s not often you have the occasion or wherewithal to heat up a giant vat of peanut oil, so we follow the emergence of our golden, glorious bird by throwing 50-60 spring rolls into the still-hot fryer. The Deep Fried Chinese Thanksgiving. It’s a wondrous event.

After the jump, a discussion of the pie tee.

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Pie tees are also referred to here as “top hats,” and the dish is traditionally a fried pastry shell filled with stir-fried vegetables, minced pork, and sambal, a Malaysian chili sauce. We learned how to make the pastry shell, which is basically a thicker version of crepe batter, and then we dipped into the batter specially-made pie tee molds, pictured above, which are basically the inverse of a muffin tin. The process is delicate and complex, requiring knowledge of exactly how to make the batter and exactly how long to fry the shell for, neither skill which I have refined enough at this point to post a recipe. In other words, I’m still in the testing phases, and until we’re settled in our house and I’ve had time to season my cast-iron wok and buy some pie tee molds of my own, I’m going to have to paint in broad brush strokes. Baby steps.

Before you even make the pie tee shells, however, you make the filling, which cools and drains while you’re messing around with a hot pot of oil. Our filling had sauteed bean sprouts, topped with freshly sliced cucumber, sliced omelet and homemade sambal:

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Sambal is fantastically easy to make — just take a handful of fresh red chilies, a clove of garlic or two, a healthy chunk of fresh young ginger, and around a 1/4 cup of fresh pineapple and pulse everything in a blender or food processor. Finish off your product by mixing it with a little soy sauce just before serving. This sauce was my favorite part — it was spicy and sweet, and with the soy sauce sprinkled on top it was the perfect balance to the crispy but otherwise mild flavors of the cucumber, bean sprouts and egg. I think it would be a wonderful alternative to Tabasco sauce on scrambled eggs, in case you want a reason to make sambal and can’t find pie tee molds in your neighborhood Williams-Sonoma. (I’m kidding. I’m pretty sure even my neighborhood Williams-Sonoma — or Kuala Lumpurian equivalent — wouldn’t have them.)

Finally, below is a picture I found online of what the finished product should look like. By the time we got around to assembling our pie tees, I was eating them as fast as I was assembling them. Those little pastry shells are the perfect vehicle for just about any fresh, summery filling, from salad to chilled shrimp with mango. I loved them, so much so that I have no photos of my own finished product:

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