I’ve been thinking about whether or not to share this with anyone. There is, you see, a little nasi lemak place high on the hill above KL and, well, it’s really good. And I mean REALLY good. So good, in fact that you can find me trekking all the way out there several times a month to have breakfast and believe me, this is not just around the corner: Take the elevated highway to the very end of it, all the way out to Ampang. Continue past Ampang village and on past Ampang waterfront (that place, by the way, is worth a blog of its own) and on and on. Turn right in the direction of the only landmark to be found, i.e. the Carrefour desecrating… Come to think of it, there really wasn’t anything to desecrate.

Now comes the tricky bit. You pass a few dull intersections and then you have to turn left to ascend the hill. If you’re not familiar with the area (and let’s face it, why the hell should you be, there really is nothing there) you’ll have to be careful not to miss the turn. Up and up you go, heading towards Hulu Langat, singing “Climb every Mountain” fabulously out of tune and there, just at the top, on your right, you see what looks like a DBKL interpretation of a public toilet for tourists (half of it actually IS a public toilet for tourists) and here you have reached Walhalla.

I know you’re going to question my nasi lemak judgement, so I would like to insert a few quotes from local friends unbiased by the fact that I got up at seven in the morning to pick them up from their homes, drove them for miles while making interesting conversation and then bought them the very nasi lemak they are now gobbling up, only to drive them all the way to work after that. Quotes: “Wow”; “Damn Siok”; “When are we coming back here?” – See???

And what makes it so good? The rice is lemak, the ayam goreng is freshly gorenged, the sambal is not too sweet and the whole thing is better than the sum of its delicious parts. In short, like the nasi lemak of my youth, misspent as it may have been. But seriously, don’t just take my word for it, this place is open daily and I think it nasi lemaks from 7:30 to 11:00am. Go early, climb the hill behind the warung and enjoy the view while you’re at it. And remember, climbing the hill after your nasi fix will consume one tenth of one percent of the calories you just stuffed into yourself. But then, some things are just really, really worth getting fat for.

After years And years of daily gym visits I have at last figures out the secret to great looking abs (see picture for proof). Well, they’re not actually my abs, but I’m convinced they could be. Mine are actually not bad, though a good deal hairier than those pictured. It’s not exactly a six-pack, more like a three and a half pack, but hey, you take what you get.

The other day, I was driving down the road, studiously avoiding public transport and when I stopped at a red light (very unlike some of said public transport), there was a bus standing beside me. I’m not normally shocked by the sight of dilapidation, in fact, I quite like a spot of squalor every now and again, but this!!! was something else. There was recently talk of making everyone get their old cars tested for roadworthiness, so I wondered how this sad excuse for a bus would have fared.

Here’s my question: Can we really not do better than this?? Let’s wash the twin towers just every second time, let’s plant shrubs instead flowers along the roads, let’s charge ten cent more for every highway (if we must) and let’s use the money to change the public transport system from a disintegrating one to one that you might actually want to use even though you have the money for a motorbike (or even a car).

Chips without salt? Low sodium ham? We need it and I for one love it and I don’t care if it sends me to the grave a day and a half early. (Oops, not supposed to say that on CNY) So let’s talk about salting. A very strange fashion for under-salting has been creeping into the profession in Malaysia and the excuse for it is and always has been: They can add salt if they want more. Better not to have the three people complain who love bread to taste metallic (yes, that’s where that taste comes from: Lack of salt), steak to be dull and fish to be bland and to leave the rest of us true eaters desperately over-salting the outer layers of our food in a vain attempt to impart any notion of flavour.

For here’s the rub: If you haven’t salted before (and during) cooking, it just won’t taste the same. Trust me, I’m a cook. Salt on top of fried meat is just that: Salt on top. It does NOT penetrate into the meat and you will most probably be eating more of it, because of that. So advice: A nice, even sprinkling of salt on both sides of the steak a minute or two before it goes into the pan, oven, grill… And what about the claims that salting too long before cooking will dry out the meat?? Nonsense, I’m afraid. And for once, you don’t have to take it from me, check Harold McGee’s most eminent, empirically reliable book.

There is one exception to my early salting advice and that concerns the skin side of fish. Salt the meat side first, then turn your fish skin side up and let it wait until the oil in your pan starts to smoke. Now blot the skin dry and then salt about twice as much as you salted the meat (careful here, consider the thickness of the fish, don’t overdo it). Skin side down into the pan until you can see the sides turn brown. Might be a good idea to lift the fish up about halfway through, to let more oil under the thing. Result: Crisp, very tasty skin. Turn fish around and just lightly brown the meat side. It’s the residual heat that should finish the cooking, if you want the fish to be moist. So undercook and then rest a minute or two before serving.

Next up: Vegetables! Even just saying: “Boiled Vegetables” might send you fleeing from the kitchen, but that does not have to be so. Here’s the secret to great looking, great tasting vegetables (sounds a bit like an American ad). Your boiling water needs to be as salty as the sea. Unless you’ve recently swallow a gulp of seawater you will probably get this wrong: The sea is VERY salty. Every litre has on average 35g of salt in it. That, my friends, is a hell of a lot. Go try mix up a batch and you’ll see. And this exactly is what I want you to cook your vegetables in. BUT…and this is a great big mid-western but: Only if you intend to ice water bathe them after cooking (and you really, truly, absolutely should).

Recipe: Prepare a very large batch of seawater and bring it to the boil. Have your veg ready to take the plunge and drop them in when the boil is roiling. Have an ice bath with lots of ice ready on the side. Your veg should be freely flying around in the water. Don’t crowd them in a tiny pot. As soon as they are at the doneness you want them to be, fish them out of the brine and drop them into the ice. Stir them around in there until they are cold to the core. Take out and reserve. When needed toss in butter or oil or whatever else you may fancy, or serve them cold. In fact if you cook asparagus in this way, your friends will ask you why theirs never taste  as nice as these. And the secret was: SALT.

It is really quite difficult to write a headline for anything that contains the word chorizo and not make it look like a rather crude double-entendre. I mean I’m writing about food here, so smell, taste and all words related are obvious choices, but related to the word chorizo, they’re just too obvious… I guess I could have gone with an old Marx brothers line like: It smells like chorizo, it tastes like chorizo, but don’t let that fool you! It really is chorizo. Except that’s too long. Be all that as it may, let’s get to the heart of the wurst:

I’ve been wanting to make chorizo for a while now and I’ve been putting it off, contemplating how to achieve the right result. The problem is not so much the sausage itself, but the fat. Actually, the real problem is the pig. Well, the absence of it. I can of course pig out as much as I want in the privacy of my own home, but for restaurant I need a substitute that will bring the right fat content to the party. Not only does the meat need fat, it needs fat that will stay in a solid state and not turn to grease that leaks out, for that is the real beauty of the fatty part of our household oink: The green fat that no other animal has in quite the same manner. Except…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Oh, well, shall I just tell you then? The duck, my friends! You see, I think this obsession with using chicken or beef to make sausages is completely misguided while ducks roam the pond of this our fair city. Chicken is of course a complete disaster as a sausage. Chicken sausage (oxymoronic as that may be) always needs all kinds of weird chemical help to make it resemble the real thing in any way at all and beef normally adds a kind of springy stringiness to it that a proper sausage just doesn’t have. The duck, my friends, holds the answer to all your sausage worries! It’s got enough fat to keep your sausage moist (see what I mean about the double-ents?), enough taste to go around and a fair part of the fat in a form that doesn’t melt away at the slightest rise in temperature. In short, sausage perfection.

And so… The picture above shows me holding my first chorizo (hmmm…) and getting there was pretty painless: I hickory smoked five duck breasts without cooking them too much, then chilled them, diced them and added another six raw and unsmoked breasts with a generous flap of fat still on them and spiced the whole thing up. I’ve bought ready-made chorizo spice before and that was a huge mistake. The stuff tastes nothing like a chorizo and if you think the taste will develop while you fry your salami, you’re mistaken. If your spicy mix does not taste like chorizo right from the word go, then it never will. But never fear, Chris is here and so’s the deal: Paprika, cayenne (or better still espelette) pepper in more or less equal proportions by volume, then half of that in coriander powder. Voilà!

Salt, friends, pickling, brining, curing salt and the usual NaCl in a mix that tickles the tastebuds. Personally, I think a good chorizo absolutely needs to taste a little over-salted, so you low sodium freaks will just have to sit this one out. Marinate for as long as you like, but no less than three hours and grind, grind, grind. Once only, and not too fine either. And then the fun starts…

A proper Spanish chorizo is dried, not boiled (though, possibly raw and fried, but that’s a different sausage story) and there’s the rub: How do you dry a sausage in the tropics? First you have to find a very permeable, but not perishable casing. A traditional casing will slow the drying process in this humidity, so I decided to use gauze. About three layers of thin gauze will just hold the stuff and still not prevent evaporation. Now I’ve hung up my chorizo (see picture) and am waiting. It smells so good the kitchen staff are drooling, but it’s only just been a day and the thing is still… well…, yes…, flaccid. It’s hanging in our dry store and the air-con creates a gently breeze of dry air. You can see the smoked, cured duck breast next to it, which dries very successfully into very tasty prosciutto, so I’m hoping the chorizo will dry faster than it rots.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But we can’t mince words in the world of sausage production, where corruption of the flesh is a constant danger, to be fought with salt and dry air. And here, my story kind of fizzles out, while the sausage hangs. I’ll just have to keep you posted periodically. I’m guessing that it will take a month to dry, but it could of course be much longer.