Penang: The Eats

Malaysians are crazy about food, and Penang is the food capital of Malaysia.  Centuries of trade and immigration have led to a melting pot cuisine – mingling Straits Chinese, Indian and traditional Malay flavors – that is absolutely delicious.

Penang is noted for it’s hawkers.  They’re often found in big food courts, with a bunch of food stalls and lots of tables.  Each stall tends to specialize in one or two dishes.  You order your food and sit down – somehow, the guy at the stall remembers your face and brings over your food in a few minutes.  Here are a few food courts:

Two of my favorite hawker dishes:

 

Loh Bak, above, are deep fried goodies.  The two standouts are the Chinese pork sausages wrapped in a dried tofu skin (the crinkly dark golden brown guys towards the bottom, just to the right of the cucumber) and the light, crispy prawn fritters (disc-shaped blond guys on the top of the pile).  At the stall, you pick a bunch of stuff off trays, they fry it up to order, then bring it over to your table.  The two little bowls in the back are also key; one contains a savory brown/black tapioca flour mixture cooked with egg, some 5-spice powder and dark soya sauce, the other is a sweet-ish chili sauce to give it some kick.  Gille prefers the savory, while I like the spicy.

Above is Mee Goreng, a fried noodle of Indian descent.  This dish is yellow egg noodles fried up in a savory brown gravy made with garlic, shallots, curry paste and dried fish.  The goreng above is (according to the newspaper articles pasted to the guy’s stall) famous throughout Penang for it’s squid sambal.  After the noodles are cooked and plated, a big spoonful of a sweet, salty gravy made with dried squid is spooned on top.  The whole thing was delicious – nicely toothsome fresh noodles bursting with spice from the curry paste, and pleasantly salty from the squid.  If you like anchovies and Indian food, you’ll love this.

We also ate a lot of Indian food in Penang.  There were a ton of South Indian lunch places serving a half dozen vegetable curries and rice scooped directly onto a banana leaf.  A guy in Little India sold 1 ringgit (30 cent) samosas that were unbelievable – I think we consumed, on average, two or three a day.

I’ll leave you with this sweet vision: dozens of pounds of pork belly curing in the sun.