Indochine Kitchen

Indonesian Peranakan Cooking

Homemade Pork Floss

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One of my fondest childhood memories is visiting Grandma’s house on Sundays only to catch her and some of my aunties making pork floss. They would be making it in a huge cast iron wok with at least two pairs of hands stirring the shredded pork to avoid burning and making sure it would dry evenly. The big batch would be packed in containers for the children to bring home. The children and grandchildren are pretty much scattered everywhere now, but the favourite dish is still strongly present in our heart. Not until recently I have been reminded that we can do this. I have always stocked up on Lim Chee Guan’s pork floss when we travel to Singapore, but since it has been a while and the last time we were there, we couldn’t get to the store. I got the other brand at the airport and not too fond of it.

Pork floss is a great breakfast condiment when the kids need something quick for their rice breakfast. Yeah my children is the ultimate Asian kids. They have rice and soup before school. Mother strongly feels that the grandkids need a good filling meal of steamed rice and a couple of dishes (normally that would include fried eggs and leftover soup from the day before). If none of those available, they would have rice, egg and pork floss.

The first time we make it, it was nothing less than self torture. A big exaggerating, but it is. We did it late in the morning, and since then I decided that if I am to do this regularly, I will do it in the evening. Our kitchen is basically outdoor kitchen, so during noon, the sun would be straight on top and the idea of stirring a batch of meat to dry under scorching sun is absolutely crazy.

The second time (and more times after), the meat was prepared in the morning. When I came home from work, we stir fry for a couple of hours, the kitchen is nice and cool.

There are two variations of the recipe, but I will only share the simplest one.

To make good quality pork floss, very lean meat is needed. We got the butcher to clean off all fats. Only four ingredients are used. Lean pork, soy sauce, white peppercorn and sugar. Garlic is optional – the first time we used garlic, but the taste was a bit overwhelming. We choose to leave that out in the future.

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Indonesian Vegetable Tamarind Soup | Sayur Asem

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I was so lucky to be able to stay and study in Bangkok for three weeks last month, and it was really a once in a lifetime opportunity, I endlessly remind myself how lucky I was to be able to  learn the things that I had always dreamed of. For those who know me, you would know that I am insanely passionate about everything food related. So if I am not updating my blog for a long time, be assured that I am somewhere in my kitchen (at home or work) doing something or cooking something or baking something – or yelling at somebody in the kitchen.

I have also been told that if you do what you love for a living, you will not have to work a day of your life. That turn out to be not entirely correct – although it is true to some extend, but exhaustion would make you hate that thing you originally love. I was on the verge of hating it, until I took that break in Bangkok and I came back all refreshed.

I love Bangkok to bits. Although I have to admit that I spent not that much time sprawling around under the bridge or hot humid open air market hunting for street food – we spent time in lecture rooms almost 12 hours a day, but afterwards we always had great dinners – food courts in Bangkok malls are really good! I know. I am so ashamed. Food court? Bleah. Although they lack certain kick, they are so good. After five dinners of pork tomyam and rice with somtams, I was ready to try something else. I had mango and sticky rice every single night (okay, I am exaggerating – it’s more like eighteen nights out of the twenty nights I was there). Of course I missed my boys and girl, but when I had Thai food, I kinda forgot about them for a bit. Haha.

It was also strange to find that Bangkok has been “Japanized” in a lot of ways, as in the “depachika” would sell more Japanese inspired snacks and meals than those Thai food and snacks. I was equally obsessed about Japan and everything Japanese, I tried to stick to Thai food and snacks.

In the spirit of Thai food, this is our version of “tomyam”. This soup is always present in Indonesian style seafood restaurant. Unlike tomyam or sinagang, Indonesian version of tamarind soup is entirely vegetable based sour soup or easily called “Sayur Asam”. Sometimes people would add a bit of dried shrimps or shrimp paste for that extra punch. It has quite a bit to prep, and it is almost impossible to just make a small batch. So be prepared to be stuck with a big pot of sweet, salty, sourish and spicy vegetable soup but it does taste better after the first day. Keep in refrigerator and you can enjoy it for two more days. I personally think after the third day, the vegetables would become too mushy, unless if you don’t cook it too long to keep the vegetables in there crisp, so it would age nicely after the second day. Never tried it myself. Ours are always gone the first day. If it last till the second day, something is definitely wrong.

I think every family has their own sayur asam, tamarind vegetable soup.  Our favorite sayur asam is from one of my aunties’. Nobody in our family does it as well as she does and people keep asking her for recipe. So, this is it. .

The main ingredients would be tomatoes, melinjo seeds and leaves, corn, cabbage, young corn, long beans, fresh nuts and cabbage. Spices used are galangal, lemongrass, salam leaves, red chili and candlenut. Spices used are very strong smelling, so they are countered by salt and a lot of sugar. She is using combination of castor sugar and gula melaka. The soup is incredibly fragrant and tasty!

First step is to grind spices or blend it in a blender. Add a cup of water with tomatoes, candlenut, shallots and red chili.

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Braised Pork with Soy Sauce | Tau Yiu Bak

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This is the classic of all home-cooked Chinese dishes, in and outside of China. Every household has their own twist and everybody loves their mama’s Tau Yiu Bak (or braised pork in soy sauce). I, naturally, prefer our version. The deep brown, made from bite-sized morsels of pork, layered with skin, fat and meat, all deliciously braised in a salty, sweet sauce to become melt-in-your-mouth tender. The secret is that to use both type of soy sauce. Light salty soy sauce and sweet dark soy sauce compliment each other and delivers the saltiness and deeper complex moreish flavour to the dish. Our braised pork in soy celebrates the meat and local soy sauce, nothing less and nothing more. The whole bulb of garlic and eggs are just meaningful companion.

Kids and adults alike can have fulfilling lunch (and dinner, and breakfast for the next day) with steamed rice and this sweet and salty dish. The hard boiled eggs are usually first to go. The lean meat would be next in line. Other fatty bits with gelatinous bite is loved by the older ones. The last to go or the one get wasted is shiitake mushrooms. It is necessary because it imparts such complex flavour to the dish. When cooked nicely, mushrooms can be quite delicious.

The braised pork in soy sauce calls for a couple of bulbs of garlic, soaked dried shiitake, pork trotters and hard boiled eggs. Pork trotters can be substituted with any kind of pork meat. Most commonly used is pork belly. The trotter was particularly fresh and nice that morning when we dropped by the butcher, so we got it. Normally we would also use pork belly. The secret is to not cut the pork too thinly so that the long braising period will not cause the pork to be overcooked.

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Coconut Milk & Gula Melaka Agar | Agar Gula Merah & Santan

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This is a pretty and super easy Indonesian dessert, rich with the flavours of coconut milk and palm sugar, but still light and refreshing. Again, as with so many Asian desserts, texture comes into play, this time with the use of agar agar, which is a setting agent made from seaweed. It is widely available here compared to animal gelatine. It splits the moment your teeth sinks into it, it is almost crunchy if you make it right. The other unusual characteristic of agar agar is that unlike gelatine which requires refrigeration to set properly, agar agar sets at room temperature which explains why it is very commonly used in the tropical climate of Southeast Asian countries. Another interesting feature of this dessert happens when it cools, the coconut cream floats to the top leaving the bottom half layer a beautifully translucent amber. If you like lighter colour, you can use less palm sugar and substitute with plain sugar instead.

This agar is one of those Mother does best. Unfortunately, it doesn’t keep very long because the coconut milk is not quite boiled, just quickly heated. So it has to be served and finished in short period of time, one day or two.

Swallow Globe Brand is the agar that is widely used, remember to get the plain one. We use two packs for the big pudding mould. It can hold up to 1800cc of liquid mixture.

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Hakka Braised Sea Cucumber

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Mother is the typical hardworking Hakka woman, who works tirelessly to provide for us and cooks only the best meal especially during Chinese New Year, where all dishes have to be made out of the best quality ingredients. Grandmother always hydrated her sea cucumbers and there were tales of our great grandfather who owned a provincial store hence with unlimited supply of dried sea cucumber, naturally he got to enjoy sea cucumbers almost all his life.

I have never prepared dried sea cucumbers, and when I asked her if we could just purchase a dried one, she snapped, why get a dried one and all the extra work, when we are gifted clean ready to eat sea cucumbers? There’s a good point right there. Sea cucumbers are gifted as Chinese New Year gifts from others, usually in the form of dried or ready to cook. It is considered very auspicious food item to eat during the most auspicious day of the year in Chinese calendar. Since mother is Hakka, we have mostly Hakka dishes, including braised sea cucumbers and Buddha’s Delight (Luo Han Chay).

Sea cucumber is tasteless on its own. Its prized character is its unusual gelatinous texture that can be really awesome when cooked correctly. One of its peril is overcooking, because it turns mushy. The sea cucumber takes on all the other flavours best when braised with other ingredients, it will soak up all the juices and have combined flavours of everything.

This is the sea cucumber we had last Chinese New Year. It was given a couple of weeks before and stored in freezer.

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Easy Vegetarian Fried Vermicelli | Fried Bee Hoon

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This easy vegetarian fried vermicelli is a staple at home. It takes very little time to cook, as long as the ingredients are grated / cut / prepared a day before. This is almost a weekly breakfast menu at our home. It can be cook very quickly and in a huge batch, enough to go around to our neighbour’s house, and bring it to work for lunch. It is dry enough, so it can last till afternoon. The vermicelli is also children’s favorite. Even if they spill it on the floor, it is easy to clean up. That is quite important 🙂 This fried vermicelli is great for bento box item. I would love to make bento for the kids, will do so as I can drag myself out of bed before they have to leave for school. Hah.

The ingredients are always prepared one day before, so when you wake up in the morning you don’t have to worry about the hundred of carrots you need to julienne or grate. Dried rice vermicelli (or bihun) is also soaked the night before.

Here are the ingredients. Rice vermicelli needs to be soaked overnight, if you forget to do it, it is not going to cook nicely. Drain and keep dry until using. Cut some Chinese green mustards or any green vegetables, get rid of the older leaves. We only use the stalks and young leaves. Some shredded cabbage, grated (or julienned) carrot, bean sprouts (everybody’s pet peeve is the sprout with the tails still intact) and chopped Chinese celery. The eggs are to be fried and shredded thinly for toppings.

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Buddha’s Delight | Vegetarian Luo Han Chay

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This special vegetarian stir-fry dish is a popular festival dish, usually prepared to celebrate first day of Chinese New Year, the celebration of Cheng Beng, or any other cultural events. In our family, grandmother always had this for the children and grand children, but now, mother and aunties take turn preparing it. This week we were celebrating the Cheng Beng week by cooking a lot of grandmother’s favorite dishes and laying them out for praying. After the midday pray, we could all enjoy the dishes or send them out to those who couldn’t come. The usual chaotic yelling and screaming is expected, especially in the kitchen. This is the first time I learned the dish so I got yelled at quite a lot. They were quite persistent that all vegetables and dried items are to be cut the same size. You can certainly tell my cutting was everything but neat. Most families will have their own version of Luo Han Chay, but I can assure you that it is a 100 percent vegetarian dish, a Buddhist dish, so there will be no shallots and garlic. This is our version. Enjoy!

The recipe is enough to feed 4 households, so please adjust accordingly. The cooking method is rather straight forward, prepping work was overwhelming. It is the norm for the dish to have “8” in it, be it 8 ingredients, 8 slices of this, 8 slices of that. We tried to pull the 18 ingredients, but could only manage 12.

The ingredients were added as they were “remembered”. Isn’t it nice, that such important dish in Chinese tradition to be so forgiving? They would be like, oh we have this, or let’s dump this in there. Cabbage, black fungus (wood ear), dried shiitake, mung bean noodles, fried tofu, tofu skin (we got the freshly rolled tofu skin), lily buds, canned vegetarian peking duck, a couple of tomatoes and slices of carrot. Also Chinese green mustard (not shown here) were used. Other ingredients that can be added would be ginkyo nuts, red dates, napa cabbage, black moss, lotus seeds, etc.

The tofu skin were deep fried in deep hot oil for 5 minutes till golden and all crispy. Be careful of the hot splattering oil. It is bound to splatter. After frying, cut them into 5cm length.

The dried ingredients should be soaked in cold water for at least 3 hours in advance. Lily buds are to be tied into little knots and soaked. So do mushrooms, black fungus and mung bean noodles. When soft, drain water and set aside.

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Preserved Cabbage & Roasted Pork Soup

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Hi, this is me, Jun. Three years later, three babies later (they are little monkeys now as I typed). Many things have happened, less and less cooking, and I have ventured here and there.  During that time I learned sewing, quilting, bag making and dress making – I can only sew baby clothes and my own and I am not going to write about the sewing . But as the boys (and girl) grow up, acquiring their title as a bunch of noisy toddlers, it is time to start the kitchen activity.

I have lost the old sites with all the recipes & images and I really do think it is time to cook and start documenting again.  For those who have sought me out, please do know that I am forever grateful that you would remember me and my little cooking site and actually took time to write to me.

The soup would be perfect for those cold winter nights but no winter here. So this will have to do even in the hottest afternoon. It was scorching hot when we were preparing this. A huge jar of lychee iced tea was finished by the time it started boiling on the stove. For this I use store-bought roasted pork and store-bought preserved cabbage (kiam chay). It was slightly too spicy (I forgot to remove the chili – please don’t do this) for the children, but the father enjoyed the soup as we both love the succulent boiled roasted pig trotter and generous chunks of pork bellies and the preserved cabbage.

It calls for very simple ingredients, all of which can be purchased in Asian groceries. The main stars are roasted pork (we got trotters, bellies and meat) and whole preserved cabbage (this comes in fresh form, sold in bucket of salted water in Chinese groceries). The others are whole tomatoes, lemongrass, salam leaves, bulbs of garlic, shallots and chilies. We added too much of lemongrass and salam leaves, so I adjusted the recipe accordingly.

Mother thinks it is absolutely necessary to rinse the store-bought roasted pork with cold tap water, pat dry and refry them in alarmingly hot oil. If it was up to me, I would never do that. She fried them till slightly dried and blistered. I have to admit they looked mouth watering. But I am not sure the whole extra work of heating the oil, washing the extra wok and the danger of refrying cold fat meat with splattering oil everywhere really worth it.

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Stuffed Tofu

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South East Asian countries are where fried food went to die. There are simply so much fried goodies than the rest of the world combined. Anything can be fried and eaten. I once visited Tegal, Central Java, where a food stall owner whipped up a bunch of tapioca flour with some water and dropped spoonfuls of the batter in hot oil. When turned brown, the batter become something crunchy on the outside and very questionable gooey transparent looking thing inside. She then served it up with chili sauce and handed it to me. For me anything deep-fried served with chili is good.

Tahu sumedang or stuffed tofu is popular street snacks. Tofu used is not the silky type, rather the denser type that can be deep-fried in batter and sliced. It doesn’t cost that much to buy off the street, but not that difficult to make at home either.


It is usually served with thick gooey brown sugar and chili sauce or fresh bird’s eye chili. Since I don’t know how to make the brown chili sauce, I used chili. It is scarily spicy. Omit if you have a faint heart.

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Pig Trotters In Tomato Sauce

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What happened? Two babies happened. We are so happy for them, they really light up our days (and night!) They are God sent gift and we couldn’t be more grateful. Moving on, I have received so many emails from blogger friends and fellow Indonesian Chinese cuisine lovers and I must admit that I have not been cooking at all aside from blending mushy food for the babies. It is so easy – they never complain. But of course it would not be forever. I am contemplating on learning cooking Japanese food for them because it seems easy? It seems that way. Any thought?

Moving on to cooking. This pork dish is my favorite. Only a handful of restaurants serve it and then it is not always available. Mother always claims it is so easy to cook. But yeah, she never does until one day she decided it is time to teach me how to. It is so delicious, the gelatinous part of the trotter, the sweet sour and spicy sauce. It is basically a one dish meal.

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