Malaysian Food Tour in Melaka (Malacca) Peranakan, Nyonya ,Mamak, Portuguese, Malaysian Street Food

All right, I don't think we're done. She's filling up another pitcher full of chilies right now. Not many Westerners know the name of this Malaysian city today, but 500 years ago, it was the most important port in all of Southeast Asia. Indians, Chinese, Arabs, and European traders all made their way here to try and make their fortune off the lucrative spice trade that once flowed through this port. Today, you can still find traces of this past through the food, so let's go eat. The Peranakans, or Straits Chinese, are an ethnic group that descended from early Chinese settlers who came to Southeast Asia in the 15th to 17th century. These early Chinese settlers mixed with local Malays and adopted some of their customs while also maintaining their Chinese traditions. The cuisine that arose from this mixture is referred to as Nonya, where they have mixed Chinese ingredients with spices and cooking techniques used by the Malays. This is Sean. He and his wife run a small Nonya restaurant where we are having lunch today. We are at a place called Unicorn Cafe right now, and this is a traditional Peranakan restaurant. I'm very familiar with Chinese cuisine and Malaysian cuisine, but with the mixture of the Malay and the Chinese that created the Peranakan, I'm very interested to try this because I've never had it before. This is a little appetizer. It's called pie tea. And what it is, is this crispy little pastry shell crust stuffed with vegetables like jicama, coriander, topped with this little chili sauce. It looks amazing. Alright, so it's almost reminiscent of an egg roll because it's got that crunchy outside and then that savory, spicy inside. It's delicious. Angie wouldn't give me the plate until she had already eaten two of them, so I'm kind of looking forward to this. You put a little bit of the chili sauce on top. I'm just going to shove the whole thing in my mouth, so bear with me. Those are awesome. You can really taste, as Angie would call it, the jicama. It's not jicama. It's jicama. And the chili sauce that's on top of it here. Burst of garlic flavors in your mouth there. A hint of lime in it. And then all of the chilies. These are fantastic. I'm eating all three of these. She's not getting any of them. Okay, so they bring out a plate of rice with a bit of egg on it. And it looks like there's some vegetables of some kind over here. I have no idea how these are done, so we'll let you know. But this dish here, the first one, is called pong te babi. And it is a pork dish. I don't know anything more about it other than it's a pork dish. But what you can see here, whatever the base of this sauce is here, as you look around the rim of the bowl, you can see this whole little oil slick that's on top of it. And this looks fantastic. And then the next one over here is a satay nonya. What is different about this from a typical satay is, it's not skewered satays and then grilled over. It's an entire sauce with the pork or chicken, whatever you choose. This is also a pork. So we're going to give these a try. Nonya satay. Come on. Wow. That is such a thick, flavorful sauce. And it kind of tastes similar to a rendang. Very similar to a rendang, but it's got this tang. It tastes like kefir lime leaves and adds a nice different dimension to it. It's so good. Like Angela said, it's very reminiscent of a rendang type sauce. Maybe not as thick and heavy as a rendang sauce, but the lime leaves that are in it, the kefir lime leaves in this, it bursts through the whole thing. Another unique satay and this is amazing. I'm going to dive in and try the pong teh babi. Which is a pork and it is cooked in a fermented soybean paste along with some local type of sugar. Let's give this a shot. Let's see. That's amazing. That's very flavorful. You can taste like the fermentedness of the soy. I don't know if that makes sense. Like it adds a little bit of a sourness, but then the sugar adds a sweetness and then the pork is fall apart tender. Oh, it's good. That pork is done so well. Okay, I'm curious what these little sides of vegetables or pickles of some kind or something. That's a nice addition. Oh, my God. A little bit of a zing to them. They're almost refreshing. It's cold. Get a little bit of the sour on there, a little bit of spice on them. They're delicious. Oh, my God. Very strong flavor of like curry leaves in those vegetables and they are like a little bit of tang, crunchy. Malacca has a very complicated colonial past. For more than 400 years, European powers such as the Dutch, the English, and the Portuguese held this port. Of the three, nobody quite left their mark on the cuisine like the Portuguese. In 1511, a fleet of Portuguese ships arrived in Malacca to get a piece of the wealth that flowed through the port. For 130 years, they held Malacca in spite of numerous attempts by the local sultanates to take it back. The king and the church encouraged the Portuguese men here to marry local women and have families. The descendants of those Portuguese are called Cristang and have their own Creole language, culture, and cuisine. Here in the Portuguese settlement of Malacca, there is a thriving Cristang community. It was founded in 1933 by Jesuit missionaries in order to gather together the people to help better preserve their culture. For decades, it was a poor fishing village, but recently it's become a tourist attraction, which has really helped with the income of the local community. Today, Julie from De Lisbon Restaurant has invited us over into her kitchen to watch her prepare some traditional Portuguese-inspired dishes. And thank God, because it has started raining on our way over here and we'll be happy to take cover. Julie starts the curry double with the aromatics. She chops red onions, ginger, fresh turmeric root, and lemongrass. This mixture gets added to candle nuts and blended together to an aromatic paste. Next up, she fills the blender stuffed full with spicy red chilies. Then another pitcher full of those red chilies. She does this several more times until the mixture turns a deep red color, just like those chilies. Here's the final product, which gets simmered for about an hour to blend the flavors, then cooked with potatoes and chicken. Did you see how many chilies you just ground up inside of there? That's crazy. So this dish is called curry de bal. I don't know if we mentioned that already. And a lot of people think that de bal means devilish curry because A, it's spicy hot, and B, look at that deep red color. But de bal actually means leftovers because this meal was traditionally prepared with leftovers from the chicken feast. So whatever leftover chicken or meat you had, you would throw it in this sauce and make your de bal. Curry de bal. Curry de bal. I was going to say, you need to put more rice on that. I was going to say, Jeff loves his rice, so let's give him more rice. Get the color on that. All of that color is from blended up chilies. As you saw her when she was making it inside there, look at that little beautiful piece of chicken. I'm so excited to try this. So you can correct me if I'm wrong here. It's thought that this dish may have originated in Goa, India. Which was also a Portuguese colony, so that makes a lot of sense. The spices and everything, you can see that. Yeah, I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm very much looking forward to this. More sauce for me, please. Oh, good to see. Look at that chicken just fall apart. The amount of chilies that went into this, I'm just super curious to see. I'm going to go straight rice here. If there's spice on this. Did you see the blender? Wow. There's heat on that. Oh my God, that tastes so tasty. Oh, that curry has this beautiful richness and thickness, which I think is coming, Julie said, from those candle nuts, right? They call them candle nuts because they used to make candles out of them. They're so oily, right? She ground up a whole bunch of them and put it in there, so it gives it this really rich, rich texture. Wow. That is so good. So good. You love it? Oh yeah. There's a nice amount of heat on that. That linger, you saw the amount of chilies that she mixes up when she makes a batch of her curry sauce. Wow. Yeah. It's really good, too. You've got all of those aromatics, your lemongrass, your galangal, your turmeric, your ginger, right? And it's interesting because it is Portuguese inspired. Even though it has those classic Asian ingredients, it doesn't have a super Asian flavor, and I think that's because of the lack of sweetness, which typically a lot of the Asian cultures will put sugar into their curries, right? And this tastes very European in a lot of ways, even though it's got all those Asian ingredients. I'm so happy with this dish. ------- awesome. That is definitely thunder. We might not be able to get home. We have to stay here. Angel is going to kick us out if we try anything else. If you come to Malacca, you have to come over to the Portuguese Village and try the Debal Curry. Because it is unbelievable. Unbelievable. I'm a little blown away by this right now. I'm going to help him with this then. You get chicken. Get that piece of chicken. That wraps this up. Alright, she's done. The largest migration of Indians to Malacca happened in the 19th century during the reign of the British Empire. However, traces of Indian settlements date back as far as the 3rd century BCE. And similar to the Peranakans, there was an amalgamation of Indian immigrants with the local Malay culture. There is a mixture of Malay and Indian cuisine here in Malaysia that is referred to as Mamak. And we are here today at Kahaya Dinar to try some out. We've got this dish here. It's called Mamak Rojak. So Rojak is kind of a mixture of things in kind of a sweet palm sugar dressing. A lot of the versions here in Malaysia are fruit-based but this Mamak Rojak has just a whole bunch of stuff into it. It's got an egg. It's got tofu. It's got cucumbers. It's got these little fried fritters. Let's give this a shot. Ooh, I don't know which piece to choose first. Let's get some tofu because that will really soak up the sauce. I'm not sure what exactly I'm looking at here. I can see cucumbers. It's the only thing I can make out at this point right now. It's like a sweet, peanut-y dressing. It's actually like, see there's big chunks of cucumber and some vegetables in here. It's like a refreshing, slightly spicy, peanut-y salad. It's amazing. Wow. I'm going to be completely honest with you. It didn't look all that appealing when I looked at the bowl but my god. I'm going to try a big piece of egg here. Get the sauce on. That's amazing. That is really good. Winner. And this is Roti Canai. You find it all over the place and they do their own little twist on it here in Malacca as well. Fun fact, Roti Canai was voted this year as the number one street food in the entire world. So let's give theirs a try. I love Roti Canai. If you watch our Kuala Lumpur food tour, we'll leave a link up there. You will see how terribly I failed at making it. But I'm really good at eating it. That is so amazing. It's fluffy, it's perfect. It's just a plain Roti Canai that we have. There's no flavors into this. But that is awesome. The world needs more savory pancakes. This is a good idea. Angela and I are both huge fans of Indian food in general. And I've got to say that while you get some familiar tones of Indian spices to these dishes here, this doesn't resemble anything Indian I've ever had before in my life, but it's fantastic. This is Maggi Goreng. And I've seen it on menus around here a lot and I would never order it because Maggi is just a brand of instant noodles, like the ramen noodles you used to eat in college, right? But apparently every chef has their own take on it and it is specifically Mamak. Now how fried instant noodles came to kind of represent the colliding of Malay and Indian cuisine, I have no idea. If you have some of the history behind that, let me know. I'm just going to try and eat it. There's almost like a curry leaf flavor that he's added into this along with like chunks of tofu, a little bit of vegetables. It's actually, you know, for random instant noodles, basically just gussied up by the restaurant. It's pretty tasty. I don't know what to make of Angela's reaction to the Maggi Goreng, so I wanted to try it for myself here. Oh yeah, there's big chilies in there. Big chilies, yeah. That one got me. Yeah, big chili. I wasn't expecting that. Yeah, the noodles absolutely look like a free package thing of ramen noodles that you would find. But they've done it really well. This is something called Murtabak. And apparently it is from Yemen in its origins and is still a really popular street food all around the Middle East. But Indian Muslims brought it here to Malaysia, of course, as usual, put their own spin on it. It looks like a little stuffed pancake. We got the chicken one, so there's chicken and like a bunch of veggie stuff inside and like nice little gravy to dip it in. This looks good. All right, so you've got some really lightly cooked vegetables, so you've got like a little bit of crunch, maybe some red peppers, onions, carrots maybe. There's definitely egg in there and then chicken. And then this is a little bit like an oily, slightly spicy sauce. That's good. We're going to go in one more time for that. This is kind of like a snack. It's delicious. The sauce is great. Slight little bit of heat to the sauce there. Ah, that's good. Traders from the Indonesian island of Java have been active in this region since ancient times and Malaysia is home to the largest Javanese population outside of Indonesia. We were surprised to find out that a popular local treat, cendol, was invented in Java back in the 12th century. So one of our viewers, his name is Kang Wui Choo, said that we had to try cendol here in Malacca. So here we are at Cendol Kampung Ulu and we got a bowl of cendol, it's got those rice flour pandan noodles, red beans, coconut ice cream, longan, shaved ice, coconut milk, palm sugar, all that amazing stuff. It's really good but I still can't get over having red beans in desserts. It's not something I'm used to but it's super tasty. The palm sugar in here, refreshing. I got a big mouthful of palm sugar there. That's awesome. So when the Javanese invented cendol, it was actually just a drink that had these rice flour jellies in it. The shaved ice wasn't introduced until the British brought it here to Malaysia in the 19th century. The sweetness, I assume, you have to kind of expect with a big lump of palm sugar in it. But it is tasty. I never thought I would like a dessert so much that's got red beans and corn. That sounds to me like a salad. Salad doesn't taste as good. That is so good. So far we've been showing you dishes that have been influenced by all of the cultures that have settled here in Malacca. We thought it was about time to show you a dish that was born right here in the city. Let's go eat. We are here at Mekwek's restaurant to try a dish called satay celep. Celep is actually Malaysian. It translates to dip. We're going to show you why in a second. Step one. Once you get to your table, you're going to have a little gas burner set up in the middle of your table. They bring a pot out and a bag of sauce. And then in the pot, they dump a bunch of peanuts into it. Dump their sauce. Mix it in with a little bit of water. Throw it over the gas burner. Get ready for your satay sauce. Step two. Grab one of these trays and head on over to these refrigerators that are stuffed full of all different kinds of things to enjoy on a stick. Satay, right? Grab a stick. Handan chicken. Chicken satay. Classic. Get some tofu because I hear that sauce is good. Big old mushroom for Jeff. Some broccoli because we're trying to eat healthy. Water spinach. This is pork ear. I've never tried pork ear. Salami. Bacon slice. Just regular pork satay. Look at all this. Jeff's feeling adventurous. Pork intestine. Think that's enough to start? You have so much food there. Step three. All of these amazing skewers you just picked up at the fridge. Put them in that sauce that's boiling up right now so they can cook. Step four. Get your skewers out of the sauce and shove your face with spicy peanutty goodness. Right. Oh my god. That is awesome. Oh wow. So all the sticks of food that you saw Angie grabbing earlier. They have, try and hold that up, little colored ends on them. Right. Red, blue, green, whatever. Or plain, whatever color they may be. And what happens is when you're done with your meal at the end of the night, they come through and they count the sticks. And that's how you pay for it. It's kind of like being in Spain with tapas or pinches. Yes. That's pork ear. That's the pork ear. Yep. Alright, here we go. Pig ear. I never ate a pig ear before. It's really soft, right? Like it's cartilagy. Yep. I was expecting it to be kind of chewy and it melts apart in your mouth. Pig ear. I am still going to challenge just about anybody to find me an animal that tastes better than pig. Any point in any form. These are pig intestines. You don't even want to try? Nope. No desire to try that. That is so delicious. Pig intestines. Tastes good, actually. Oh, that's good. Meantime, I'm going to try this prawn. It's just all about the sauce. Nothing in that sauce is going to taste bad. Including the pig intestines. They were good. Pork satay. Not all these skewers we got, but I'm pretty sure Jeff's about to go back for more. I'm going back for more. That is super good. Claws. Synchronized crab claw eating. Oh, that's it. That's delicious. That's the one. Dumplings. Oh, yeah. I love dumplings. Oh, they got chives or green onions in them. Oh, yeah. They're good. Oh, it's delicious. She's smart. She's got a little bit of sauce she just put on her little plate so she can dump on each little bite. The sauce is the best part. That's so smart. That's why you're here. That's like the soul of the dish is the sauce, right? What you got there? I have a fried tofu puff. Okay. With all these holes on the inside, it just soaks up the sauce. I think tofu is an ideal food for this method of cooking. It is peanutty. It's got a little bit of heat to it. A lot of crushed up peanuts, yeah. You can taste a lot of what's going on in the garlic, the lemongrass. There's a lot happening inside of that sauce. It's a great big mushroom. So stupid. Delicious sauce. It's awesome. Ridiculously delicious sauce. For dessert. Last piece. This is pork liver. Let's give it a shot. I'm not a big fan of liver, but I had to try it. It is a bit much. It's that irony flavor. It's chewy, but not as bad as I expected. It's not as horrible of a memory of eating liver as a child as I once had. Am I going to finish it? Absolutely not. All right, we quit. We're calling it. Just counted 38 skewers we ate between the two of us. Well, at least you know how much that cost once we get the bill. So the total on that came to 149 Malaysian Ringgit, which is very reasonable. And that included the two large tiger beers that we had. Yeah. Now, for step five, go home, take a nap. Here in Malaysia, her name is Nur Haslina Hassan, said that we have to try this dish called asam pedas while we're here in Malacca. So we're here at Asam Pedas Apok to give it a try. So what we've ordered here is two different asam pedas. One of them is kampung, which is a mackerel fish. The other one is called jenahak, which is a golden snapper. So basically it's a basic snapper that's going in there. Let's give them a shot. So asam pedas is the name of this sauce, and it translates roughly to spicy and sour because the sauce is made up of chilies and tamarind sauce. So I've got a little piece of the kembang, which is the mackerel fish. Let's give this a shot. That sauce is something else like it's got some heat to it. But it's offset by that sourness, I guess that's why they call it that, from the tamarind that comes in here. Oh my gosh, this is fantastic. I'm going to give the jenahak a try, which is the snapper. Done beautifully. The tamarind in the sauce jumps right out at you. And just when you think you've gotten by it, the heat hits your mouth, which is great. Oh, it's good. Try this jenahak fish. Golden snapper, you said? Good. So a bit more of a flaky, drier fish than the mackerel, which is a little bit more oily. But this dish is all about this amazing spicy sauce. Wow. This one is the kembang. It is definitely all about the sauce though, right? Honestly, the fish plays a minor part in the whole dish. Your whole mouth just bursts with the flavor of the spiciness, a little bit of sourness, sweetness from the tamarind that's happening in it. It's unbelievable. So as we were sitting here enjoying our fish, the great staff here at the restaurant came over and offered us a small container of this. And he said it's a beef version, it's called tatel. So I was going, that sounds familiar to me, where do I know that? So we went back and looked through the comments from Nora Slina, and this is actually what she recommended to us. We just thought it was the asin pedas, but she does say specifically the tatel. So the great staff here has offered us a little bowl of it, and this is it. Let's give it a shot. Now, just so everybody watching is aware, what tatel is, is beef tendons. It's not a main cut of the beef, it is beef tendons. Holy ----. My God. Tendons before. I was a little skeptical of putting that in my mouth. That is awesome. You've got really, this is unbelievable. That is amazing. Wow. That wraps up all of the fun that we had here in Malacca, exploring all of the various cultures here through their food. Yep, and we are out of here in two days, so you guys be sure to like and subscribe so you can see where we end up next in Malaysia. Bye.