Authentic Thai: Mad Thai.

Wandering into a restaurant, sans reservation, sans recommendation is not usually something I do often...but one Sunday afternoon, after church service, we thought of lunching at Oh's Deli on their superb roast pork, but alas, it was done only on order. So we skipped acrossed the road, and spied this curious restaurant...named Mad Thai.

Intrigued by the name, we browsed the menu, and a gentleman came out to entreat us to enter, highliting some items on the menu. Very nice service! So we dropped in...the decor was quite nice...soothing.

Started our meal with a typical Thai salad...the mango salad

Quite a decent sized serving...heaped with julienned Thai mango, drizzled with fish sauce, chilli and crushed peanuts. Tasted very authentic, beautiful flavours...sour, sweet, spicy, salty and very aromatic.

We also order the Panang Beef Curry

Typically a thick red curry, this version had the gravy a bit less viscous than I anticipated. The gravy was very rich coconut flavours, with a touch of spice. The beef, seemed to be high quality beef, was sliced thinly, and was a bit over powered by the rather strong gravy. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this dish, especially as a counterpoint to the sour, salty mango salad.

One of their signature dishes is the Home made Tofu with seafood

What a beautiful dish...a magnificent splash of colours. Fresh seafood...the fish, prawns, and squid were very nice and fresh. The tofu made in house, and deep fried before being doused with the thick gravy. Very nice. Flavours a bit muted, but in combination to the other two dishes, quite superbly balanced.

Seemed to be a very interesting restaurant, with some beautiful flavours and good service. Recommended.

Mad Thai Authentic Thai Cuisine & Charcoal Barbecue
384 East Coast Road
General@madthai.com.sg
6348 6686

Putien Tofu...great stuff...but how is it made?

Tofu...love it or hate it. In Asian cuisine...especially Chinese, Japanese and Korean, tofu features prominently as a key ingredient. One of my challenges to my European and American friends who proclaim their love for Chinese food is if they like or even love tofu. If they do, they have crossed the threshold of appreciation.

But how is tofu made? Well, there is tofu and there is tofu. Like the eskimos who have perhaps 10 words describing snow, the Chinese have perhaps as many describing tofu. One such variety is the hand made tofu presented in Heng Hwa cuisine as interpreted by Pu Tien Restaurant. I have featured them several times, as I love the pure, clean taste of their cooking (and will feature their Summer menu this Thurs).

I visited Putien's Central Kitchen where meat, produce is received and prepared for the restaurants. The kitchen is exceptionally clean, and each food preparation area is kept seperate to prevent cross contamination...meat and fish are handled in a different room as vegetables, for example. But I was there to see the tofu making...so on we go

What makes their tofu so special? Well, it it totally hand made. Yellow beans are ground and simmered in water till a milk is extracted. This milky liquid, known as tau huey water is the nutrient rich soy milk used as a substitute for cow's milk and is a popular all day drink in Singapore.

To this milk, a saline is added. Chef Larry Li Gongba at Putien tells me that in a commercially available tau huey (smooth bean curd, usually served cold by the likes of Lau Pan in Old Airport Road Food Centre), the process of extracting the curd from the milk is done by adding gypsium and then gelatin added for the smooth texture. But the Pu Tien's version is purer...as only a mild saline solution is added slowly to the milk, till it curds.

Once curded, the curds are dished out...and can already be eaten

The curds are crumbly, and has a very mild taste, only the fragrance of the yellow bean permeates. This curd is ready to eat, but Putien does not serve this.

The curds are put into a wooden container lined with muslin cloth, and the water content pressed out, leaving the solids. This process is similar to making cheese.

And the resultant bean curd is cut into strips and deep fried in vegetable oil at 100C. A higher temperature will brown the curds, and lower will not create the texture needed. Only virgin oil is used. A new batch of oil is used for every wok full of bean curd. Of course, the used oil is not wasted, but as it is bean curd infused, it is used in cooking in the kitchen later.

Virgin oil is needed because if the oil is reused, it will get dark, and impart the colour and flavour to the bean curd.

The lightly fried tofu is delicious. The heat of the oil causes the small air bubbles caught within the tofu to expand, giving a wonderful airy texture. The skin is sligly crisped, and with a bit a sea salt, delicious to eat. This lightly salted, lightly fried tofu is then sent to the restaurant kitchens to be incorporated in to the Pu Tien's dishes.

note: the restaurant name is Putien, while the name of the city in Fujian, where the cuisine comes from is Putian.

Putien Restaurant

Soon Soon Huat: innovative pork chops

recommended by Kennard...lunch with Kennard, Ken, Dean

Henderson Road...block 94...sits in mature HDB estate, complete with leafy trees, a large car park, a small park right next door...perfect neighbourhood place. But at one corner of a coffeeshop marked "The Old Place", we find a cze char with a different signboard - "Soon Soon Huat Restaurant - branch"...in Hokkien meaning smooth prosperity...the main restaurant is somewhere in Bedok.

A search on the usual blogsites and hungrygowhere came up with nothing. The only article on block 94, was Leslie's 1A Curry Puff article.

We tried 4 dishes, and I would highly recommend the butter pork chops



As it was served, it didn't look anything like the butter pork ribs from Two Chefs. But more like Siang Hee's pumpkin prawns.

Smothered in a buttery sauce, and garnished with curry leaves, the pork chops were very tender although it showed a remarkable lack of fat. The slices of pork chops were fried till browned and slightly crisp on the outside, while the insides remained medium doneness.

The sauce provided a rich, smooth base to allow the pork a platform to fully develop in fragrance, flavour and taste. There was no porky smell, but just meltingly good tender pork. Very nice. Unique dish and highly recommended. If I were to make a small change to this dish, would be to add more slices of powerful chilli padi for added punch.

The other dishes were also very good. The sambal kangkong was a good example of how this dish should be done.



I might have preferred a bit more spicy, but the balance of salt was great. The kankong was also young, tender.

Their black bean sauce fish slices were also excellent.



Slices of song fish, complete with skin (I love the springy texture of the skin), stir fried with condiments, spring onions and a thick black bean sauce. The fish was fresh, clean and tasty. The sauce was excellent.

Their House tofu was also very good.



Homemade tofu is deep fried to a crisp exterior. Zi Yean does an examplary version of this dish, and sets the benchmark. Soon Soon Huat's version is very good, but not at the same level. Eaten with the sambal belachan, it was very nice.

Overall, a very nice cze char find. Relaxed environment, easy of parking. I will definitely come back to sample other dishes...the menu is rather extensive.




Soon Soon Huat Restaurant
94 Henderson Road

Zhou's Kitchen: eating at Tung Lok's own home kitchen?

with family

Zhou's Kitchen is touted to be the modelled after the Zhou family kitchen...the very kitchen of Andrew Tjoe, restauranter extraordinaire of Tung Lok. Serving home made like specialities, this is a rather newer concept in the very successful Tung Lok chain...which ranges from the high brow high dining venues like My Humble House, to more regular down to earth places like Zhou's Kitchen.

Housed in house like structure at the former beer brewery, the restaurant oozes with some charm.



The decor was quaint, and simple...rather homely.

Wasabi Prawns, a dish supposedly invented by Tung Lok's Executive Chef Sam Leong



Indeed proved to be one of the better ones around...the other being Peach Garden's wasabi prawns. The very fresh, large prawns were succulent, crunchy, and smothered with the wasabi-mayonaise paste. The wasabi had a small kick, and was not totally creamy as some tend to be.

The Hae Cho, a typical Hokkien/Teochew dish also had a home-made feel:



Rough chopped prawns and meat with chesnuts were wrapped with bean curd skin to form a tube, and deep fried. The skin proved very crispy, and the fillihg was very flavourful and rich tasting.

The house tofu, with spinach



Great tofu - smooth, creamy, fragrant...Maybe because this is one of my favourite dishes, but perhaps the base material of good tofu hass either readily available, or many of the chefs have mastered the art of making great tofu. This dish was excellent...but perhaps its my soft spot for tofu. It was fragrant, smooth, rich, creamy. The spinach provided a nice complement.

We also had pan fried beef



Slices of very tender beef was pan fried with black pepper. Very nicely done. The sauce was beguilling, and provided just the right balance of salt and savoury. The beef had some texture, but was tender enough to almost melt in mouth.

Definitely a good place for a family meal, not expensive, good service, great food.

Zhou's Kitchen
368 Alexandra Road
The Copperdome, Anchorpoint
Tel: 6473 1123
http://www.zhouskitchen.com
Lunch: 11.30am - 3.00pm
Dinner: 6.00pm - 10.30pm
Hi-Tea: 2.30pm - 5.30pm (Sat, Sun & PH)

Loy Sum Juan, Singapore

One of our favourites, our family have been coming to Loy Sum Juan for nearly 20 years. Famous for its prawn paste chicken...har cheong kai, and Cantonese dishes, Loy Sum Juan is the gold standard to compare fried chicken.



My first taste of their iconic har cheong kai was way back in 1990, when the restaurant was still in Outram Park. And I have been coming with my family since they moved to Tiong Bahru Plaza...initially under the management of the older gentleman...always impecably dressed in a suit. After his passing, the restaurant is now managed by his son who is the chef and his daughter who keeps the business humming. They have kept the tradition going, and I have not found any compromise to taste.



The classic chicken was in top form...it always is. I sense a taste of tau joo in the belacan and prawn paste in the thin, almost non-existant batter. This provided a fragrant, piquent character to the dish. Full of flavour. I don't know what else is used, but the chicken is extremely crispy, and very tender and moist inside. I can only think of deep frying in a very large pot of very, very hot fat. Magic!



Super delicious, this dish keeps me coming back year after year. The chilli sauce for this fried chicken is also specially prepared by the restaurant for this dish. Somewhat similar to chilli used in Chicken Rice, but more diluted, it kept the chicken great company, complimenting in both taste and mouthfeel. With each mouthful the explosion within the mouth of the tender, rich, fat chicken, the crispy skin, and the spicy sour taste of the chilli is wonderful.

The restaurant is also famous for the steamed Song fish, but today we didn't order that. Perhaps another day another blog Instead, we opted for pork ribs, and done with coffee sauce.





Glistening in the dark, beguilling sauce, the pork ribs were slightly tough, very fat, but tasty.



The sauce was a bit sweeter than I would have liked, and altough I could not detect the blend of coffee used, and it blended nicely with the pork. The sliced, roasted almonds are also a nice touch, and provide some crunch.

We also ordered a soup prepared with 3 types of egg - century egg, salted duck egg, and chicken egg made the stock very rich, and tasty. Whole garlic was used for flavouring, and interestingly had a powdery feel, leading me to believe it has been brewing for a while in the soup...certainly not the typical garlic which will tend do be crunchy, and pungent in taste when bitten into. Typically cooked with kau kee, we opted for spinach, as I prefer the vegetable.



To round up the meal, we also had soft japanese egg tofu in a hot plate. A cast iron plate was heated, and when it reached cooking temperature, it was greased, and beaten egg was poured over...allowing it to cook under the heat of the plate. A light sauce of minced pork, prawns and spices was then poured over the cooking egg. And finally the tofu added.




Loy Sum Juan
302 Tiong Bahru Road
#06-03/04 Tiong Bahru Plaza

p.s. I am also trying out shooting with only one lens...the 100mm macro lens - an old lens I usually use to shoot watch pictures, rather than the usual 17-40mm I usually use for food. The restaurant was rather dark (for the camera), and I had to push the ISO to 1600 before I can get reasonable hand held shots with a 100mm lens with an aperture of f/4. At 100mm, the depth of field is smaller than with a wider lens. Will try a small tripod, and/or a flash next time and shoot with a smaller aperture to get deeper depth of field.