As you can see from the video, my chwee kuehs were a bit less smooth and springy as I would have liked, so I’ve tweaked the recipe here for better results –

INGREDIENTS for Chwee Kueh batter-

• 150g rice flour
• 2 Tbsps tapioca flour
• 1 Tbsp wheat starch (optional)
• 700ml water

METHOD:

1. Place all ingredients in bowl. Blend 5 seconds at Speed 6.
2. Cook for 5 minutes at 100°C Speed 2.
3. Transfer into oiled moulds, place in steamer basket.
4. Steam (Varoma) for 20 minutes or until done (depends on type and size of moulds), making sure to line the steamer lid with a clean towel.
5. Remove and serve with topping. 

INGREDIENTS for Chwee Kueh topping –

• 4 Tbsp minced preserved radish (rinsed), pref sweet variety (per brand used in video, blue label)
• 6 cloves garlic
• 2-4 Tbsp sugar (depending on sweetness of preserved radish)
• ¼ cup vegetable oil
• 2 Tbsp dried shrimp (soaked)
• ½ Tbsp cooking caramel (optional – I didn’t use it in my video because my favourite Chwee Kueh memory from Singapore didn’t have it in theirs)

METHOD:

1. Place garlic, dried shrimp (and preserved radish if not pre-minced) in bowl. Mince 2 seconds on Turbo setting.
2. Add all other ingredients and cook 12 mins at 120°C Speed 1.
3. Place on top of steamed rice cakes and serve. Leftover topping can be stored in fridge for 3 weeks.

Print PDF

The post How to Make Singapore Chwee Kueh (Thermomix) first appeared on Jackie M..

I love chicken floss but as a kid growing up in Malaysia it was always a bit of a luxury item so I never got to eat as much of it or have it as often as I wished. (I guess they mustn’t have been cheap even back in those days.)

I remember my parents might pick some up in Kuala Lumpur during one of our infrequent day trips to Malaysia’s capital, or  sometimes we might have them at Chinese New Year. It was a special treat and I would ration my portions carefully and lick the inside of the plastic bags they came in, to make sure I got at every last scrap.

Westerners are generally a bit confused about what it’s used for; while I like eating it straight, I’ve seen it used as a topping on congee or buns, or as sandwich filling.

I attempted to make my own chicken floss here in Australia in my pre-Thermomix days – the recipe called for hand-shredding cooked chicken meat, and then gently frying it in a wok for over an hour or more with all the seasonings added.

It didn’t turn out so well – the shreds of chicken breast were too coarse and all the arduous wok-frying yielded something that felt like a flavoured kitchen scourer in my mouth. I wasn’t too keen about having to stand over a hot stove for the duration either, stirring the contents in the wok to make sure they didn’t burn.

When I bought my Thermomix back in November, I researched recipes I could try with it, and found that a few people have had pretty good results making this long lost childhood favourite.

I had some leftover chicken from some Hainanese chicken rice I’d made, so I deboned about 500g of it, blended it in the Thermomix, added the seasonings and then set it to cook for some 35 minutes.

At the end, I took it out (found it still had a bit of moisture in it) and tossed it into my Tefal Actifry for 10 minutes (you could just put it in the oven at 170°C as well, or pan-fry it on a stove). It turned out perfectly.

A couple of days after that first experiment, I found some salmon fillets in my freezer that I had bought over a year ago at Ikea and promptly forgotten about. I would have thrown them out (the bag was split, so the fillets were caked in ice) but I decided there was no harm in trying to make fish floss with them (for personal consumption).

I threw them, still frozen, in the steamer basket and cooked them for 20 minutes on the Varoma setting, then transferred them into the bowl, whizzed it for a couple of seconds, added the seasoning and cooked it the same way as the chicken floss. I added a bit more of the thick caramel sauce this time around, so the result is a bit darker than the chicken floss I’d made earlier.

Here’s the video I shot, followed by recipe at the bottom (if you don’t own a Thermomix I’d imagine you can blend the cooked meat/fish in a regular food processor, and then pan fry everything like what I did previously. I think the blending would have made a world of difference compared to shredding the meat by hand).

Chicken or Fish Floss Recipe

INGREDIENTS:

• 500g cooked chicken or fish
• 8 cloves garlic
• 4 Tbsp sugar
• 1/2 Tbsp fish sauce
• 1 tsp chicken stock granules
• 1 tsp thick soya sauce aka cooking caramel
• 1 tsp pepper
• 2 Tbsp oil

METHOD:

In Thermomix bowl –

1. Place 8 cloves of garlic and process at Speed 5 for 1 second.
2. Add 500g fish cutlets (skin off) and process at Speed 5 for 5 seconds.
3. Add the following – 1 tsp thick soya sauce, 4 Tbsp sugar, 1/2 Tbsp fish sauce, 1 tsp pepper, ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp chicken stock granules.
4. Cook at 120°C for 15 minutes, Speed 2, measuring cup off.
5. Add 2 Tbsp oil.
6. Cook at 120°C for 15 minutes at Speed 2.
7. Remove and spread on baking tray; bake at 180°C for 10 minutes.

Print PDF

The post How to Make Fish Floss or Meat Floss (Thermomix) first appeared on Jackie M..

It was so heavy and our block of welfare units was so flimsy I wondered their balcony was going to one day break off under the weight of the mill. I think they used it to make cili boh (chilli paste) but I’m not entirely sure.

Now, one of my main frustrations with Malaysian recipes is the use of a lot of tough, fibrous ingredients that a regular blender or food processor struggles to handle.

For years during my restaurant days here in Sydney when I blew the motor on yet another blender, I thought back to that stone mill and wished I had one in my kitchen.

I reconfigured my recipes to avoid things like fresh galangal, lemongrass and the like. I used frozen, minced lemongrass and powdered galangal and turmeric. I also tried using bottled ginger puree but it always had a strong taste of preservatives to me so it wasn’t suitable for subtle dishes like Hainanese chicken rice.

Now it’s been about a month since I bought my Thermomix and I’ve been testing it out on different tasks. Just so we’re clear, the direction I’m moving with this is to see how it can help me in my Southeast Asian recipes; I’m not interested in compromising my recipes by making the Thermomix do things it’s not designed to do.

Anyhow, I decided to test it out on these ingredients I’ve always struggled with – lemongrass, turmeric, ginger and galangal – to see how they would turn out. Here’s the video with results –

Also noteworthy is the fact that I didn’t need large amounts of these ingredients to make the Thermomix work – those knobs of ginger and galangal in the above pics were pretty much all I put in the bowl, from memory.

My stepmom used to dedicate entire afternoons in order to process her lemongrass. She would have to give her blender a break every two minutes, go away and do other tasks for half an hour and come back and continue, otherwise it would kill the motor. She was so impressed with how the Thermomix performed, she ended up buying one from me.

Sign up to my newly-set up email list to follow my Thermomix experiments – http://jackiem.com.au/Thermomix

Print PDF

The post How does a Thermomix Handle Asian Ingredients? first appeared on Jackie M..

I really didn’t know much about it and figured it was sort of a glorified blender for people (read: rich Westerners) whose diets consisted mainly of healthy dips and smoothies.

I don’t do “healthy”, and I don’t do dips or smoothies. In other words, my interest in checking it out was really non-existent.

Then I met Zona. If you know Zona you’ll know she’s an ardent Thermomix consultant and evangelist. A Thermo-evangelist if you will.

Somehow she managed to convince me to spend an afternoon testing my Laksa Nyonya recipe on her Thermomix.

It worked out brilliantly. I went away thinking of possibilities with this strange new machine.

The Thermomix isn’t going to replace everything – it doesn’t deep-fry, bake or do high-heat wok charring. If you make stock from bones in large quantities like I do, you’ll still need your stock pot.

There are, however, a bunch of dishes that I don’t make as often as I’d like – dishes that require me to stand in front of a stove stirring for hours. Splattering oil all over my kitchen. There are others I don’t attempt at all – Nyonya curries that require fresh ingredients that are fibrous and hard to mill. That sort of stuff.

I think the Thermomix could handle a lot of them. So I invested in my own Thermomix and it was delivered a week ago today. I’ve been experimenting with it – so far I’ve made Har Meen (prawn noodle soup), red bean sweet soup and garlic chilli sauce (recipe in next post).

Questions about the Thermomix? Email me directly at jackie@jackiem.com.au.

Download Jackie M’s FREE Guide to Asian Ingredients e-Book

Print PDF

The post Jackie M’s Thermomix Review first appeared on Jackie M..