The Malaysian Insider :: Food
The Malaysian Insider :: Food |
| Erawan: Chef Korn’s take on Chinese New Year Posted: 15 Feb 2013 05:04 PM PST  The fabulous Yee Sang featuring more than 100 ingredients! It is absolutely delicious and half the fun during the eating is trying to name the different ingredients as you pick up chopstick-fuls into your mouth! Dried fruits and nuts, alfalfa, pomegranate, enoki mushrooms, pineapple, beetroot, guava, sweet corn, kidney beans, pickled garlic, water chestnut, honeyed ginkgo nuts and gold leaf can be found among the traditional pomelo, Korean pear, carrot, radish, pickled ginger, cucumber, flour crackers, jellyfish and salmon sashimi.  So colourful... glutinous rice shrimp balls. Yummy! We had this amazing yee sang with Thai nuances at a pre-Chinese New Year celebration. "Just nuts and dried fruits comprised 60 ingredients already," Korn told us later. "The vegetables, nuts, seeds and dried fruits are all organic. I kept adding ingredients — there are 105 in all. This yee sang is so healthy." Already his mind is working on how to incorporate a version of this dish into his regular menu where even two people can share it. "I will also add in some edible flowers." The Fish Maw Soup that followed after the yee sang was fabulous. The fish maw had been simmered in an abalone and scallop sauce together with black mushrooms. It was topped with a fat knob of Alaskan crabmeat and served with pickled green chillies and black vinegar. The chillies and vinegar gave the soup a tart, hot lift.  The Crispy Rolls are presented in a very interesting manner. Since the last time we ate the Crispy Rolls, they have taken a new form — a cone! There was a whole betel leaf in it together with vermicelli and a chunk of crabmeat dipped in tempura batter and deepfried, and fresh crabmeat at the bottom. A red curry sauce brought it all together. They are attractively presented in a holder with a jar of the sauce. Korn said he was bored with the Pomelo Salad, so he deconstructed it, added more ingredients which then allows the diner to play around with them to produce at least 16 different flavours. The Pomelo Platter has four types of seafood — prawns, scallops, deepfried crispy tuna and Alaskan crab — which you can then eat with four types of fruit such as Taiwan pomelo, Thai pomelo, grapefruit and navel orange, topped with crushed peanuts and kerisik and a spicy Thai sauce. So we mixed and matched: crispy tuna with grapefruit, scallop with Taiwan pomelo, crab with orange and prawn with Thai pomelo, and changed the pairing again. Each match brought different flavours which titillated the palate as the chef had predicted.  The "new" Pomelo Platter... many different taste combinations (left). Fancy durian in your curry? The Massaman Durian Curry is fabulous. (right) I also loved the Roast Duck with Mee Sua, the noodles having been fried first. Have you ever had durian in a curry? It was a first for me and it worked — the sticky smooth unripe Thai durian that tasted almost like potato in the Massaman curry, and since there was a slight durian aroma, only chicken would go with it. I liked the bite of the durian, and altogether it was a divine curry. "It's my family's secret recipe," said Korn.  Try the Durian Platter for dessert... you won't regret it. There was the Mango Platter, with the Thai water lily mango, pandan sticky rice and coconut ice cream. The Banana Platter presented a candied banana topped with peanuts, and coconut ice cream. These popular desserts have been updated and given a whole different taste sensation. The restaurant will close from February 25 till March 14 so go sample the Chinese New Year specials now. Most of the new dishes are posted online at http://www.erawan-classicthai.com/. You have to order the main courses in advance. Erawan Classic Thai and Fusion is located at No. 22-1, Jalan PJU 5/16, Dataran Sunway, Kota Damansara, Petaling Jaya (Tel: 03-6141-2393).  The Braised Duck Teochew Style at Erawan is delicious. |
| New El Bulli movie in the works Posted: 15 Feb 2013 12:28 AM PST  Ferran Adrià at El Bulli restaurant in Spain in 2007. — AFP file pic Based on Lisa Abend's book The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià's elBulli, the film will "mix" fact and fiction, says Vendome Pictures, which will be producing the movie. For her book, food journalist Abend was given behind-the-scenes access to the El Bulli kitchen in 2009, where she was privy to the rigorous training programme and the inevitable human dramas that unfolded among the kitchen's brigade of young, ambitious chefs. Every year, out of 3,000 applicants, only 32 were chosen to apprentice in Adrià's kitchen, where they would work 14-hour days in a triple Michelin-starred restaurant 160 km north of Barcelona, also named the best restaurant in the world five times by Restaurant magazine. Adrià shuttered the restaurant in 2011 at the height of its popularity, when the eatery was the foodie's ultimate pilgrimage site, drawing two million reservation requests annually for 8,000 seatings. The film, written by screenwriter David Wilson, is expected to begin production this year. In 2011, German filmmaker Gereon Wetzel also released a documentary on the restaurant, entitled El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, which captured the kitchen as chefs boiled, roasted, fried, steamed, spherified and vacuum-packed foods in culinary alchemy. El Bulli will reopen next year as The El Bulli Foundation, touted as a culinary research and development centre. — AFP/Relaxnews |
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