Hullo to readers old and new.
I’m working on a series about the economics and power dynamics of food in Singapore (where I grew up). The first of these pieces will be co-published with my friends at New Naratif – if you’re interested in South East Asia, I recommend reading and supporting their journalism – they’re one of the few truly independent news sources in the region. That’s still taking shape, so this week, I’m writing about two recipes I encountered on my trip.
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At the bottom of this email is Fiona’s pandan chiffon recipe, exactly as it was sent to my mum. I have no idea who Fiona is, but this is the best pandan chiffon I’ve had, and I wanted to share the recipe not because of the excellence of the cake, but because I was struck by how remarkably serious the recipe is. If you’re the sort who reads recipes, you may want to take a minute to read that before continuing.
Remember that pandan chiffon is basically the Dunkin’ Donuts Old Fashioned of Singapore, consumed almost as the bycatch of a coffee break. Fiona’s recipe starts with making first pandan extract then coconut milk. Neither activity is particularly difficult, but to insist on both suggests competitiveness. She was, I think, tuning this recipe like a race car.
You can buy grated coconut at any wet market in Singapore – produce vendors have piles of coconuts that they will crack and grate on request. If they’re busy, you’ll probably get moaned at for free. The stall will have one of two kinds of grater. The inferior ones all seem to come from this one workshop somewhere on the island. I’ve never seen one without the cheery Ming Eng spatter shield. Chunks of coconut go in the top, grated coconut comes out the bottom. They’re considered the inferior solution because the coconut is grated husk and all, resulting in the flecks of husk you can see in the output.
The superior graters look like this, but even more Mad Max. You split the coconut then hold each half on that borer head and wiggle to get all the flesh out. There’s a blast radius.
Once you have the grated coconut, the rest is just sweating. A lot of serious cooks insist on squeezing their own for curries, but I’ve never seen fresh coconut milk specified for baking before. The instructions include a note to “only buy the fresh coconut on the day of baking, as it will not keep more than a day.”
Two other things about this recipe make me think it’s highly refined. The first is how little flour there is. Flour is basically what you use to make a dessert stand up. It adds nothing except structure, so you want to use as little as possible. A flourless chocolate cake is a brownie without the boring stuff. This recipe has a lower proportion of flour than any other recipe I’ve seen, by at least 15%. The way you minimize the amount of flour in a recipe is by making it over and over again until your failure rate gets unacceptably high.
The other is the lack of oil. Most chiffon cakes are made with oil, and most of the rest are made with butter. I’ve seen only one other pandan chiffon recipe that didn’t use oil, so it’s clearly not a common approach. Vegetable oil, though, is like flour in that it’s basically tasteless, but you need fat to give the cake richness and moisture. This cake gets its fat from coconut milk instead – it uses more of it than any other I’ve seen. The secret of this cake’s greatness might actually the water content. Coconut milk is about 80% water, so this cake also has more water than most other pandan chiffons.
While I was home, my mum made this pandan chiffon not once but twice. The first time she didn’t have time to press her own coconut milk and used the packaged stuff instead (“but the one brand that’s really the best one you can get from a packet,” she insisted), and wanted to see for herself how much of a difference it made. You might be disappointed to know that any difference between them was probably due to the concentration of the pandan extract, because making pandan extract at home isn’t a precise undertaking.
I mention this to give you a sense of the kind of cook my mum is, as a preface to the other recipe, which is what she calls “brandy chicken.”
“Brandy chicken” is a recent addition to her repertoire. She didn’t make this when I was growing up, but she’s become fond of it in recent years. The recipe is as follows.
Take one chicken and rub with salt. Put in a pot with very little water, maybe half a cup, and 1-2 bottles of brandy. Cover tightly and boil until it’s done.
This is what she means by “bottles of brandy.”
My father worked in a supermarket in the 70s, and sales reps used to come by with these samples. My mother has held on to a suitcase worth of these, and is now steaming her chicken with cheap brandy that’s been aging in bottle for 45 years.
Pandan Chiffon Cake (Fiona’s recipe)
Ingredients:
18 stalks pandan leaves
water
1 coconut, grated, or 300 ml coconut milk
9 egg whites
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 tablespoon caster sugar
8 egg yolks
160 grams caster sugar
150 grams cake flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
Method:
1. Make fresh pandan extract by blending the pandan leaves and a small amount of water (just enough to liquefy the pandan leaves) in a blender or a food processor. Make sure the pandan leaves are very finely ground. Strain the liquid and let it stand refrigerated, overnight.
2. The mixture will separate into two parts, water on the top and a thick, green juice that sinks to the bottom. This is the pandan extract and this recipe calls for 2 1/2 tablespoons of this juice. Gently pour away the water. If you have excess pandan essence, freeze it in ice cube trays for subsequent cakes.
3. Pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius.
4. Buy fresh grated coconut from a wet market (300 ml is about 1 coconut’s worth of milk) and extract the fresh coconut milk by squeezing it from the grated coconut. To extract the coconut milk, you have to add a little water to the ground coconut and then wring the damp coconut in a cheesecloth or towel. I gave the recipe to a friend who was wringing dry coconut until her helper said, “Mam, must add water first.” Only buy the fresh coconut on the day of baking, as it will not keep more than a day.
5. Beat the egg whites with cream of tartar and the tablespoon of caster sugar until stiff. You can omit the cream of tartar, as I do, but your cake will have larger air pockets, as the cream of tartar helps to bind the beaten egg white tightly together.
6. In a separate bowl, add the remaining 160 grams of caster sugar to the egg yolks and whisk. Add the coconut milk and the 2 1/2 tablespoon of pandan extract together, then add the cake flour, baking powder and salt.
7. Fold the egg white mixture into the egg yolk mixture gently and pour into a bundt pan. This recipe works best with a bundt pan to ensure that the chiffon rises and bakes evenly.
8. Bake the cake for 35 minutes, cool and slice the cake out of the pan with a thin bladed knife.
NB: My mum bakes at 75 min at 160C instead.
A piece from Eater about the role of WeChat in Chinese restaurant culture in the US. Subculture still exists, it’s just less visible because it’s more online.
This is let them eat cake, a weekly essay about food systems (and also, food). I write about these things because I’ve worked in food for over a decade, mostly as a chef, and am writing a book about how deeply fucked up, and how deeply worthwhile, this whole enterprise of feeding people is. Also, writing is cheaper than therapy.
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best,
tw
18 pandan leaves?? Don’t think I’m going to try making this in the US. Also, do you have a sense of how the canned coconut milk that one gets in Asian supermarkets in the US compares with using the grated coconut juice?