Tuesday, August 17, 2010

F'd Up Singapore Dessert

I was recently in Singapore on a business trip and my host took the team out to a local market (Lau Pa Sat Festival Market) for dinner.  Interesting place with a wide selection of Asian cuisines.
We ordered a wide range of dishes, Sambal Stingray (excellent!), Chicken, Beef and Pork Satay, Sambal kangkong (water spinach), prawn rolls, chicken with dried chilis, plain chicken wings (why I have no idea), and something that resembled a large snail (maybe a whelk?, no idea but they tasted good).

After the meal, my host insisted I try the Ice Kachang which is a Singapore shaved ice dessert.  I was thinking, "Shaved ice, how bad could it be?".  They asked me what I wanted on it and I said "surprise me".  This is what I got.
The yellow stuff is durian (a type of fruit) which if you're a fan of Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel is something he loathes and can't eat.  The smell of this fruit is pretty potent with nice ripe aromas of "open sewer" and "rotting vegetables".  The flavor I think is reminiscent of garlic and onion.  Not bad if you can get past the smell but just not something I associate with dessert.

The dish also contained a lot of the ingredients described in the wikipedia article: red beans, agar jelly, attap chee (palm seed), sweet corn and coconut milk.

The best tasting part of the dish was the palm seed which had the consistency of a large semi-solid phlegm ball but at least it tasted good.
I washed it down with an entire pitcher of Tiger beer but I couldn't get the taste of durian out of my mouth.  It stayed with me all night and I was still tasting it when I woke up in the morning.