sugar, give me sugar

Thursday, February 19, 2009

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I've decided to go a little bit further with my obsession au domestication. for all who already know, you already know. took awhile to get the hang of it and cooking. Compared to cooking, i find baking much more systematic and precise. Of course there are little techniques and pieces of kitchen wisdom that come in handy but its is still by and large a step-by-step logic. But Cooking is all intuition and watching-the-fire and literal salt pinches and seemingly inconsequential spoons of vinegar and soy sauce that just might turn on you in a while. I find that incredibly hard to grasp. My guess is experience pays off. Look at my mum go. 1 hr and a hearty meal of 3 dishes and 1 soup is ready to serve . I struggled to keep my dinner prep time under 4 hrs for the first 3 days without charring anything. But things seem to be getting better. For example the YAKUN Breakfast i tried to replicate:

The first 2 tries weren't abyssmal but i was basically all over the place. Forgetting my toast in the oven, forgetting to set the alarm for the soft-boiled egg, leaving toast crumbs along my trail and at one point i got SO pissed with the vietnam coffee filter (it kept overflowing at the base plate) i crashed the whole thing in the sink which resulted in coffee stains all over the sink, tabletop and wall which i had to clean up eventually. Lesson #1 : no point gen zi ji guo yi bu qu. Three things make up a Yakun toast (for my imaginary non-singaporean readers) :

1) Thin toasts made on a grill - We're saying half the thickness of a toasted white bread. I decided i shall not be too anal about it cos slicing a toast in half, just means more cuts on mi fingers (im gonna dedicate an entire blog entry to my hand injuries). I used good bread from ichido but they turned out chewy. Chewy nice so forgiveable.
As for the butter, i use cold slices of Lurpak unsalted/salted butter , so i think i beat them flat. haha. But the butter can't be too thick. we're looking at 2 mm. I use the bottled yakun kaya LH and ML got so i'm assuming we're using the same thing the shop uses. Yum.

2) Coffee - Yakun has good Hainanese coffee. Superior kopitiam coffee. But i use Trung Nguyen (Hi-5 LH!!) so i guess we meet brow to brow! I have a problem with the filters though! 5 SGD Vietnam filters just dun work too well - i always get coffee powder sneaking thru the filters. But that can be fixed with kitchen towel filtration (that sucks up some of the coffee tho).

3) Soft-boiled eggs : NOW this is what makes Yakun Yakun really. We were thinking bout getting soft-boiled egg makers - the ones where u put the eggs into a dripping bowl which , by the time it gets empty, soft-boiled the egg. But they don't have that, but they have those little steamers that cost about 60 SGD! Too pricey plus i figured that putting 2 or 6 eggs into a steamer will still affect the results so i might as well stick to old trial and error with my bowl and boiling water. I tried 4 min. 5 min. 5.5 min. They were all too raw. So i tried 6:45 today and wow, it turned out perfect! Gorgeous orange yolk clothed in its white. its like the golden timing - 6:45. But just to be sure, i'll stick with the same bowl and water level all the time.

So after a few days of making this breakfast, I finally got the hang of it and understood the principle behind chores and cooking - its all about juggling time. You preheat your oven while you switch on your kettle, and then cut the toast, slice the butter, prepare the coffee. Toast ur bread, boil your eggs, spread your kaya and serve. But i'm YIIIIrrational so i find efficient time management very taxing. I tend to be more whatever-comes-to-my-mind-first so you find me lugging a 10kg rice bag while i remove my shoes when i could have unloaded that first.Sigh.

Here are photos of the first few attempts of Yakun. None captured nice eggs but just for the record:

2/17/2009 04:14:00 PM

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