On The Prowl For Street Food @ Alor Setar

The mere mention of Malaysian street food puts me in a culinary sensory overdrive. There's just something different about how they make it, perhaps it's the air there, or the water they use, perhaps the chickens are happier there, the cows too. I don't know. Whatever it is, Malaysian street food will always be the go-to for comfort food whenever I pay a visit across the border. Like street food the world over, hygiene standards can be questionable (most times), think cooking right next to a gutter or smoggy road side, or having ingredients exposed wide open to the stirrings of dust, flies, bugs. Well, ya, you get the picture. If you can look past the often questionable standard of hygiene, the food is, in all it's glory, glorious. Go with an open mind, and you may just find yourself pleasantly pleased. Our adventure in the Land Of The Rice Fields continues...

Wet and rainy did not stop us from hunting for makan :)

Quintessential Malaysian street food - Lok Lok.

 In some places it is also called Satay Celup (loosely translated as Dipped Satay).

What you get are a multitude of items skewered together on a stick, some cooked (deep fried, blanced), some raw, which you pick out and handover to the stall holder who will then "cook" the items up for you. If the items were deep fried, then it gets another soak in the fryer, if they are raw, then they get blanched in hot water. There isn't any hard and fast rules on what there should be on the menu - what is offer can range anything from deep fried food - meat rolls, wantons, beancurd, to raw items like vegetables, various types of beancurd, fish balls, seafood, you will also get some "exotic" items like tripe, pig's ears, quail eggs, century eggs, raw cockles. What we observed at this particular stall was they offered an "eat-in" option - you basically stand by the stall, pick whatever you want, dunk it in the pot of boiling water to cook, and eat it on the spot. Oh, before I forget, the thing that differentiates one stall from the other is the dipping sauce. Some places it is a homemade chilli sauce, some places the sauce is somewhat similar to satay sauce. Price of a stick ranges anything from RM 0.70- RM 2.00. Cheap and good :)

Wanton noodles which was said to be the best in this stretch. Yes, they were good!

Omg. This. Char Kway Kak they call it here. Down over in LittleRedDot, we call it Chai Tau Kway aka Fried Carrot Cake (carrot as in radish, not the orangey vegetable we know as carrot). To make a good stir fry dish, in Chinese cooking, you MUST have enough "wok hei" (loosely translated from Cantonese, this means breath of the wok). The wok must be searing HOT, hot enough to give the dish that fragrant "smoky" flavor. I am not taking any sides here, but I have to say that our Malaysian counterparts make the most awesome carrot cake, hands down. There is the 2 versions - sweet and savoury. The sweet (normally done with sweet soya sauce) has just a tinge of it and not cloying (like many I came across in LittleRedDot). The white (no soya sauce) is a lighter version, there is enough "smokiness" from the "wok hei" full of flavor and quite simply, delicious. One major difference about the carrot cake here is that it comes with beansprouts! I later found out that way over in Penang, they do it just about the same way too (Penang afterall, is a short drive of about 1.5 hour away from Alor Setar).

 

Uncle hard at work. "Lau nua" mode full on (lau nua is basically Hokkien for salivating)

 

Even Kedah's version of CKT - Char Kway Teow is oh-so-similar to Penang's! There is nothing to not love about this - it is hearty, sinful at the same time, surprisingly, not (too) oily at all! Only a skilled pair of hands and yonks of experience can produce something as exquisite as this :)

Love the old school vibe we still get with street food in Malaysia, with the newspaper/plastic wrapping and all. I don't believe that LittleRedDot has any of that anymore. 

 

Char Kway Kak - Fried Carrot Cake @ Kedah style.

Fooooooooooddd! So we got Wanton Noodles (don't let the paleness of the noodles fool you, whatever seasoning they put together certainly came together really well. The noodles are not the usual Hong Kong style - thin and springy, the ones here are thicker, but still with that al dente chewiness. We got some Char Kway Kak, Char Kway Teow, Lok Lok - Ngoh Hiang (meat roll), century eggs with pickled ginger and some hard boiled quail eggs too. I could do with another packet of the Kway Kak and Kway Teow, just because I'm such a glutton.

All in all, be adventurous, try local cuisine and who knows, you may find yourself pleasantly surprised. Well, if it wasn't too pleasant, then you'll have some great travel tales to share with the folks back home!