no. 101: maybe they just are
Soon kueh are among my earliest taste memories. They’re distinctly Teochew – one of the few kueh in common circulation that haven’t been adopted and adapted by another community in Singapore. A rice flour skin encloses batons of bamboo shoots1 stewed with dried mushrooms, pork, and dried shrimp (a kind of Southern Chinese trinity), seasoned vigorously with white pepper, and delicately with soy sauce and sesame oil.
They’re traditionally shaped as half-moons, with a flat or pleated edge. Today they’re most commonly made in a hinged plastic mold. It’s honestly hard to think of a less ergonomic filling. Raw egg yolks handle more easily. The bamboo shoots are a brush heap, odd lengths at odd angles, a collection of ways to poke holes in the skin. When I try to seal the pocket, it declares independence. The skin itself is finicky – the recipe I’m using (from The Way of Kueh, naturally2) is elastic: it resists flattening, but also tears like hosiery. When I make them, a third to a half of the batch emerge from the steamer in tatters. We eat them for lunch, a pile of noodles.
I’ve only been making soon kueh for 4 years, so my incompetence is on one level no surprise, but it is at odds with how readily the other kueh I’ve made have come to hand. Repetition, good recipes, and access to a superlative teacher have gotten me through png kueh, ang ku kueh, bika ambon, sarang semut, and many others (see the bottom of this post).3 And my long association with soon kueh makes their slipperiness feel like a particular sort of challenge.
On the one hand, I probably have another 30 years to figure it out, on the other hand, I don’t have that many occasions to practice. But when I do make soon kueh, I’m cooking in public, with forty or fifty people to feed. This suits my inner line cook, but he’s also constantly looking for refinements efficiencies – a skin that’s easier to handle, a form that’s easier to shape. Pinching the edges is slower than counting a rosary, and goddamnit I need to ship out in two hours.
The tension, of course, is that I make kueh not because I want to eat them, but because I think it’s important that someone makes these the old, time-consuming way.4 All this led me to call Christopher (who wrote The Way of Kueh) to talk about why my soon kueh keep exploding, and how kueh, and other old dishes, change.
TW: I'm thinking about a couple of things. One is how recipes evolve and how dishes change, and the other is, do you have a mental model of at what point is a change too much?
Chris: I guess it depends on the kueh. But also I come at it with the recognition that a lot of the time, there is no platonic ideal as such. There's just how many different families approach the same concept, right? So when you say you feel you need to get better at making soon kueh, what is your mental platonic image of a perfect soon kueh, and how did you derive that platonic idea?
TW: For me it's literally just the failure rate, which is still extremely high.
Chris: And what’s the breaking point for you? What goes wrong most often?
TW: That's an interesting question. They explode on me, so obviously I'm malforming the skin somehow, or I'm steaming too hard or something. But then there's a certain amount of just feeling fear, and these two things obviously interact with each other, because if you’re standing there making something and you know 80% of them are going to fail, that’s not a great feeling either. So there’s this kind of interesting feedback loop.
Chris: For the last month I’ve felt much the same about wu gok [taro dumplings, a nugget of mashed taro stuffed with stewed pork and deep fried], where I went through multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple trials just to nail down the parameters. But I think it's complicated by the fact of your room temperature over there and perhaps the quality of the rice flour that you have over there. And I remember you were once telling me that your mom frowns on using tapioca starch at all for kueh skin right?
TW: All that’s true. But as you and I have also discussed, using less tapioca starch would actually make the skins here harder to handle.
Chris: Yeah. Related to that, a friend of mine went to Yogyakarta and was surprised at how stodgy a lot of the classic Indonesian kuehs were compared to here. They seemed to contain a higher proportion of rice. So they were slightly stiffer, and if they were cold they were a lot less pleasant to eat.
So originally, rice would have been the sole ingredient of kueh skins. And the more rice you put in a soon kueh or png kueh skin the more fragrant it is. It has more of that rice aroma, but it does get a lot harder to handle.
If you go back like a hundred years – and I was talking to Mrs. Chia in my book – she said you really just had to soak the rice, grind it, make the kueh skin and then eat the kueh pronto. They didn’t have other things like corn starch or potato starch or tapioca starch. To be able to buy refined tapioca starch in the supermarket is a relatively recent thing. When I say recent, I mean like 60, 70 years maybe at the most.
But then also, that also coincides with the fact that not a lot of people had fridges way back when. So you had to eat the kueh soon, you couldn't keep the kueh. And so the texture would still have been soft.
My other theory is that in Singapore, we prefer softer textures now because of our exposure to Western-style cakes, starting from the hospitality boom of the 50s and 60s – you know, the post-war, all the cultural influences coming in. And also, because kuehs are now overwhelmingly made in commercial kitchens, using tapioca starch in a kueh allows it to sit, gives it more shelf life. So all of this adds up to the fact that we’re just used to having softer kueh now.
When I was in Penang in 2020, researching the book, I went to this Teochew kampong, on the mainland. And there was a kueh shop that I think was just about to close for the day. And I couldn't detect any rice flour in quite a few of their kueh. It seemed to be all tapioca starch, and it was just like eating rubber, basically. I didn't enjoy it at all. I didn't speak to the shop owner, so I don't know why they did it like that. I don't know what that particular style was. And I'm pretty sure the shop was Teochew because it was a very, very Teochew kampong. But it was totally on the other end of the spectrum.
TW: It’s interesting that you're documenting things that we talk about as traditional, but in many cases the actual details of these things are enabled by developments that are only 50 or 60 years old.
Chris: Food culture is always in flux. It's always changing. It's never static. So when we say “traditional,” exactly what period are we referring to? Thailand is a regional hub of tapioca starch production. And the Thai Teochew kuehs that I have seen in Bangkok use a lot of tapioca starch.
We talked about their koo chye kueh or even their equivalent of soon kueh, and the skins are very translucent, and in some cases paper thin. But tapioca starch is readily available there, so it's not surprising at all.
TW: Thailand is the regional hub of nearly all agricultural exports. I’d like to return to my earlier question of how much change is too much. If I start making soon kueh and chopping up the filling so it's easier to handle, is that still soon kueh? If I start making a png kueh style skin and using that for soon kueh, is that still soon kueh? If I start molding it in like an ang ku kueh mold because it's easier to handle… where do you draw the line?
Chris: I mean, you have competing instincts, right? It's like you're trying to live up to that ideal. You're trying to please your own taste buds. You're trying to move around your kitchen in a way that makes sense to you and is efficient. So which of these three things has primacy?
Do you imagine your ancestors looking down and saying, no, no, that's not the way to do it? Or are you really trying to just make something that tastes good to you? I think everyone, every cook has their own border, you know, has their own line where too much is too much. And I come back to my question, what is your end goal? Is it to make the best kueh that you can given the circumstances and experience that you are struggling with or that you have in front of you? Or are you really trying to recapture something from your childhood?
TW: I think that's a good question. Because my grandma's soon kueh were really rustic. You know, she was hand-folding, not using a mold, right? So you'd get these things that were quite large… but when you’re a kid everything is large.
Chris: And they were not elastic right?
TW: They were not elastic at all. She was clearly using a very high proportion of rice flour. And the seam was pinched and flat, no pleating. So these were not elegant creations. But I will say that we always had the distinction between soon kueh and bangkwang kueh, and you always knew which one you were getting.
So your question of what the end goal is here is really interesting because for the most part, I’m not feeding my kueh to an extended family. I’m feeding them to people for whom this may be their first, or maybe their one and only encounter with the form. We've talked about how in the context of Nyonya cooking, there’s this constant conversation between the cook and diners… how the cook’s ability to change a dish is constrained by what their diners will accept. How much of your vision is the family that you're feeding on board with, really? For me there's not really that check on things.
And I think that's maybe what leads to a lot of the kind of innovation we see in restaurants today. Because instead of a family that you have to get on board with your vision, you’re actually incentivized to just go all the way out there, which is how you have char kway teow being made with fish maw. That was clearly an outlier, but I think there's a kernel of a connection there.
Chris: I mean, what you are describing is the kind of the modern impulse, or the modern definition of chef as artist, as opposed to chef as cook, chef as craftsman.
TW: Like a chef embedded in the community.
Chris: A chef embedded in a tradition as opposed to chef devoted to iconoclasm. So, I think I'm probably more lenient about innovation when it comes to kueh than a lot of people are. I would say… why would you categorize reasons for adapting a traditional recipe as good or bad? Maybe they just are?
TW: That's a very zen approach.
Chris: Yeah. To take a trivial example, obviously I can't get the same belacan that my grandma would have used, so I just use the belacan that I have.
TW: This is one of the annoying things about the idea that “you have to make it exactly like your grandma did.” It's a shallow argument, because if you actually start to examine the facts, like, you obviously cannot do it. Like, even down to the size of the holes in the steamer, right? Considered at a sufficient level of care and detail, it’s virtually impossible to reproduce a dish exactly.
Chris: So it all comes down to how can you recreate the taste memory that is your target with what you have available.
You know, when I wrote the kueh book, from the beginning I felt I didn’t have to use exclusively traditional methods or grind everything by hand as long as the final taste was as close to what I deem “authentic” as I could get. So I don’t care what method I use, as long as the taste is what I recall.
TW: Which is how you wind up doing things like soaking your flours ahead of time. Because nobody would do that in the past. They didn't have to.
Chris: They didn't have to.
TW: And I think even today you're probably in a small minority. I'm guessing that in the course of your interviews, you didn't actually see anyone doing that. And this was your attempt to recapture what you thought was “how it tasted.”
Chris: I didn't ask anyone for recipes, but no one I asked for a demonstration soaked their flour. But, you know, even in Mrs. Leong's cookbook from the 1980s, she talked about making wet rice flour. She has a recipe for wet rice flour, where you just mix rice flour and water. And she would mix it up and then pre-pack it into portions and then freeze it. So it's not that I'm the first to do it, it's just that you know, kueh making has just become such an uncommon practice that most people wouldn't think to do it.
TW: To answer your question directly, seeing a molded soon kueh, emerging from like an ang ku kueh mold or a png kueh mold would just feel beyond the pale to me. Like it would just look wrong even if I know that I’ll be four times as fast if I mold them rather than pinch them closed.
Chris: It's interesting that you consider that quite unacceptable. The Jalan Kukoh Teochew Kueh people mold their taro kueh. They use the round mold5 for that and then they use a plastic mold for their soon kueh. So my question is, if using a plastic curry puff type hinged mold for soon kueh, if that's borderline acceptable, then why would a wooden mold be any more objectionable?
TW: It’s not the technique that’s objectionable, it’s just that the end product looks wrong.
Chris: Shape is an important visual signifier for kueh, especially on occasions when you serve a large variety of kueh or in a shop where there are many on display. If I were to see a soon kueh shaped in a png kueh mold, I would consider it offbeat. I wouldn't think of it as wrong. And if you have a slightly chunky filling like the taro one, it probably makes more sense from a logistical standpoint.
But certain kueh have become so iconic to their community, like soon kueh, like ang ku kueh, anything outside the traditional shape would make a lot of eyebrows go up.
TW: Exactly. That's kind of the feeling I have. Because here, without the family context, the taste bar is kind of, “what am I trying to represent to a bunch of folks who have no context?” I know I can get there with a soon kueh filling that’s chopped finer than is traditional, because even to me, that still has the right kind of texture because the texture resides so much in the ingredients themselves, rather than in their form factor. But I think I just can’t get over the idea of them looking like png kueh.
As a professional recipe developer, as someone who spends your life throwing yourself at walls and on cliffs in the name of culinary progress, is this a familiar journey to you? How does this go in your head?
Chris: As a culinary educator and as a book writer, I get different white whales to chase after at different periods of my life. So when I wrote the first Nerd Baker, it was sourdough, which at that time I failed to grasp. And then with Nerd Baker 2, sourdough became the whale I finally caught. Same with Panettone, same with Pandoro.
Wu gok was one of them, but I would say a minor one. Until I considered the possibility of actually teaching it, it wasn't a high priority to nail the recipe. But I'm always interested in gaining technical knowledge and application, as much as particular recipes themselves. I don’t know where my next white whale will come from. Char siew bao [steamed roast pork buns] was definitely one of them. That one lasted years. Ambon was one for sure. Pak tong koh [a sweet, plain rice flour sponge, distinctly Cantonese] actually is still one. Because there's a way of making pak tong koh where that sort of layer of tunneling, you get a bi-layered structure, so the bottom layer has tunnels and the top layer has tunnels and then there's a horizontal void between them. And I think you can only get there with a very, very specific batter thickness and I have not nailed that yet. It's not the only legit pak tong koh schema, but it is one that I'm still chasing.
TW: When you do this, does it then frustrate you that you can't find these outside? Like you talk about char siew bao being a white whale, right? So obviously not everyone, in fact nobody outside will be making char siew bao the way you think it really should be.
Chris: I usually chase after these things because I have had the ideal version somewhere. I've eaten it somewhere. And then I think, “gosh, how do I do this at home? Can I do this at home?” And then it's headlong down the rabbit hole. So the frustration is not so much that there aren't examples out there, it's that there are no reliable written recipes for a lot of these things.
Just to take an example, I have this book called The Classic Dim Sum of Hong Kong, which talks about dim sum in historical periods in Hong Kong, and clearly written by chefs for chefs, because every recipe gives you like 200 siew mai. And it’s bilingual, it’s translated into both English and Chinese. And the only part that is not translated into English is the glossary that talks about using sourdough for char siew bao. And this was super irritating, and I bought this book before google translate was available, so I was really frustrated.
So it's not so much that the things are not available to taste, it's that there’s no one to hold my hand throughout the whole development process. So it's an extra long slog.
And so the basic fact that most of the rise of the char siu bao, like the explosion that gives you that huat [that cracking], right, on top of a bao, is not from the yeast, it's from the chemical leaveners. No one flat out says that. No recipe actually tells you that.
TW: And then you have to wonder how far back this recipe really goes. Because chemical leaveners are a 20th century thing.
Chris: Yes! So with that said, if you have a very mature acidic starter for char siew bao dough, you really just need to add alkaline water. Then again, baking powder is not that young, it's at least 100 years old. And baking soda is older than baking powder.6
But also, char siew bao is not the best example because what we think of as the ideal now, as exemplified by Hong Kong dim sum restaurants… You know, dim sum restaurants underwent a lot of very rapid and intense evolution from the 40s onwards. So I don't know what char siew bao would have been like before then.
TW: And that itself is interesting, because you talk about the evolutionary pressure and this period of intense upheaval in the environment.
Chris: Yes, and that equally as much applies to kueh.
TW: And probably applies just as much today, due to the influence of social media.
Chris: Things becoming rainbow colored and so on. And for things like soon kueh and png kueh, the greatest transition was going from being primarily a home made item to being primarily something bought from outside. And suddenly you had to have production kitchens to make them.
TW: And then for that reason, you also had this narrowing of the field, where you went from having hundreds and hundreds of examples to dozens or tens.
Chris: And what changes do you have to make to adapt these items to a production kitchen setting? You know, I'm sure in the 60s and 70s, a production kitchen would just have been a room full of people, many people making the kuehs by hand, rather than relying on automation.
But then once you switch to automation, what happens, right? And when I was interviewing the Bengawan Solo people [a major Singaporean bakery chain, who specialize in kueh rather than western or Chinese pastries], Madam Liew, the founder, was saying that they tried so many times to find a machine that could do onde-onde or other kueh or ang ku kueh. She said that some kueh just cannot be made by machine. They just do not come out properly. And I would probably count soon kueh and png kueh as being among those. You can use the machine to make the dough for you, but the shaping has to have a human touch…
That said I’m sure somewhere in China there are soon kueh-making machines.
TW: So I wanted to ask you just one last question – what’s an eating experience you wish more people could have?
Chris: By eating experience, you mean literally any kind of eating experience? How to choose? So many.
TW: I didn't say it was going to be an easy question.
Chris: Okay, the most elemental thing I can think of is maybe having freshly made kueh bahulu baked the traditional way over charcoal in a brass pan [see below]. And having it hot, a few minutes out of the pan. Because I reckon very few people have done that. At least, certainly people of my generation and the ones below me.
And it's sort of like... this is only a privilege in an urban situation, right? In many places still, in Malaysia and Indonesia and Thailand, it's completely unremarkable to have freshly made kueh.
Any good market or street stall would have it. But in Singapore, it's slightly different. Another elemental experience I had was having fresh appam dipped into freshly squeezed coconut milk. You have the hot appam, you have the slightly cool coconut milk that hasn’t been cooked or anything. And that, again, is something that would be completely unremarkable in much of India, I would think, and Sri Lanka. But I don't know where you get that in Singapore.
Png kueh: rice wrapped in rice flour.
Ang ku kueh — “red turtles” filled with peanuts and sugar.
Bika ambon. Yeasted, eggy, aromatic.
Sarang semut — an “ants’ nest” of caramel and starch.
A properly oiled kueh bahulu pan.
And the results. A plain whole egg sponge with incomparable flavor.
Soon means bamboo, but in practice, many modern soon kueh makers mix some bangkwang – jicama – with the bamboo, and cook them together. An all-jicama version, bangkwang kueh, with the jicama cooked the same way, is also widely eaten.
On the one hand, I think that the modern expectation that a recipe will work first time is an unrealistic product of the culture we’ve built, on the other, I think “cooking” as a whole is at least a somewhat generalizable skill.
OK, I actually do want to eat them too.
These look like the png kueh in the photo above, but are circular. The molds were formerly made of wood, but like png kueh molds, are now made of plastic.
We were both off. Baking soda has been in use since the 1830s, and double-acting baking powder was invented in 1856.