In laksa heaven
By Madhur Jaffrey
Published: May 24 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 24 2008 03:00
In the middle of Adelaide, bounded by Gouger and Grote streets, is Central Market, the city's pulsing heart. Built in 1869, as a food market it has outlasted Covent Garden in London and Les Halles in Paris. With its mix of cafés, sweet shops, meats, the freshest fruit and vegetables, and the occasional strolling players, it offers families a glorious one-stop mix of food, shopping and entertainment.
Central Market reflects how Australia has changed from being an outpost of the western, meat and potatoes world to somewhere that has become deliciously cosmopolitan with a very Asian slant.
On my first visit, about 11 years ago, I went looking for laksa. Having been told that Asian Gourmet, a small café at the market, cooked fresh pots of this Malaysian speciality daily, I hurried there as fast as I could and left with a smile of total satisfaction.
Imagine a large, steaming bowl of rice noodles with prawns and chicken and bean curd, immersed in a reddish, lemon grass-perfumed coconut curry sauce, as fiery and flavourful as a human hand can produce, topped with a mélange of raw, crunchy vegetables and herbs - bean sprouts, cucumber bits, sliced red chillies, spring onions and Vietnamese mint - served with a side of chilli sambal and lime slices.
This is curry laksa. There are many regional variations of this soupy, Malaysian noodle dish. I was introduced to my first bowl in Penang, the city's very own tamarind-soured assam laksa. Here was Asia's answer to southern France's fish soup, a very exotic version, where, instead of the dollop of the garlicky rouille on top, the soup had been showered with a fine julienne of a pink, highly aromatic, wild ginger flower and slivers of fresh, sour pineapple. I was won over on the spot. How was I to know that a few days later, a plane-ride away in Kuala Lumpur, I would be seduced by its sisterly southern version, curry laksa.
Since that time, I have been looking for laksas everywhere. I have made a quick meal of them at Malaysian airports on my way from here to there, I have eaten them in Singapore where they have a devoted following and then, to my great delight, I found them in Australia.
The family that prepared it was Malaysian, part of a wave of south-east Asian immigrants that have been arriving in Australia for several decades. Some set up small restaurants but others, more importantly, took over farming in the 1970s from earlier waves of older Greek and Italian immigrants. Kitchen gardens with Asian vegetables and herbs began mushrooming in Adelaide's western suburbs, noodles began to be extruded from machines at small Asian-owned factories and small workshops went into the business of producing bean sprouts.
Today, in Adelaide and its environs, where one in five "locals" is of foreign extraction, it is not uncommon to run into a Vietnamese farmer. I find myself driving north-west from Adelaide to Virginia where Hien Le has recently won the Australian Hydroponic Greenhouse Association National Young Achiever of the Year award. It was his father who was the migrant, a butcher with a piggery who arrived in 1981 and began to dream of a hydroponic farm but lacked the mastery of English needed to see it through.
The son has fulfilled his father's dream. In the humid greenhouses, Vietnamese workers quietly tend to hundreds of vines, seemingly rootless, magic stalks growing upwards and then outwards for easy harvesting, each loaded with either pendulous cucumbers or a bounty of tomatoes. In the semi shade of the cucumbers are spring onions, sorrel, Vietnamese mints and basils.
The bean sprouts, in another suburb, are harder to get to as the Chinese owner has perfected some unusual techniques to give the sprouts a longer shelf-life (10 days) and suspects that I might be a spy. He relents in stages, first sitting at his desk in a silent, Hamlet-like stance, tilting his head this way and that to read my real intentions, then unlocking just one room for me, then another and then another. I will not give any of his secrets away. I can say that on the whole, he sprouts his mung beans (which are grown in Queensland) just the way I do in my New York kitchen. In a seven-day process, these beans are soaked, allowed to sit in dark covered, rectangular colanders where they sprout as if underground and develop their white "tails", and are finally washed to free the original beans of their green skins.
In an effort to find the best laksa in Adelaide today, I return to the enclosed Central Market. With Lucia's Fine Food nearby to provide a fine cup of espresso afterwards, Asian Gourmet is there and still good.
I walk on the outer rim of the market, along Gouger Street, past an all-Asian supermarket, to Kopi Tim (168 Gouger Street.) The curry laksa sauce, flavoured here with dried anchovies, may be had with rice or wheat noodles or a mixture of the two. It is very, very good. I drain the last drop. Nothing could be better.
Well, not exactly. There is yet another spot to entice the laksa fanatic. It is in a recently created area in Central Market known as the Food Court. Let not the word "court" give any wrong ideas of exclusivity. In Singapore and Malaysia, food courts are plebeian affairs, of the people and for the people, created in the 1970s and 1980s to take street food hawkers and their carts off the roads, clean up their acts and put them in air-conditioned, sanitary and controllable surroundings.
In Adelaide's Central Market, the Singapore-Malaysian food court model has been imported, wholesale. It is large, crowded, noisy and impersonal, a massive rectangular hall lined with food stalls. You stand in line to buy your food at the stall of your choice and then take your filled containers and cutlery to shared tables and eat. No table manners required. Slurp at will.
Here, there is a food stall named Laksa House. It boasts a world of laksas, including seafood, vegetarian and, for my money (under A$7) the best curry laksa in town.
I ask for curry laksa with mee hoon noodle soup. I am given a bowl that could easily serve two, with a side of chilli-shrimp paste sambal and a chunk of lime. I teeter to the nearest table with my load. Pink prawns float about in the red liquid along with slices of chicken and melt-in-the-mouth, pasta-like forms of fish paste. The fried chunks of bean curd, having soaked in the numerous flavours and aromas, are now all soft and spongy. I stir a spoonful of the sambal (a pounded and sautéed mash of red chillies, dried shrimp and onion) into my laksa, squeeze some lime juice over the top, and, holding my whole head over the bowl to avoid drips, dig in with a pair of chopsticks and a Chinese spoon. Nothing could be better. I am in laksa heaven.
Madhur Jaffrey is the author of a memoir 'Climbing the Mango Trees' and 'Madhur Jaffrey's Far Eastern Cookery'
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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