Katong Laksa

Name: Katong Laksa
Total time: 1 h 20 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Singaporean (Peranakan)
Ingredients: 400 g Thick round rice noodles (laksa noodles); 16 Prawns; 5 tbsp Dried shrimp; 12 Dried chillies; 12 Shallots; 5 cloves Garlic; 3 stalks Lemongrass; 4 cm Galangal; 2 cm / 1 tsp Fresh turmeric or ground turmeric; 5 Candlenuts; 2 tsp Belacan (toasted shrimp paste); 500 ml Coconut milk; 1 handful Dried laksa leaf or fresh daun kesum (Vietnamese mint); 300 g Cockles (see hum); 150 g Fishcake, sliced; 200 g Bean sprouts; 2 Eggs, hard-boiled; 6 tbsp Neutral oil; 2 tsp each Salt and sugar; 4 tsp Sambal chilli, to serve

The Singapore laksa whose noodles are cut into short lengths so the whole bowl can be eaten with a spoon alone — thick rice noodles in an orange coconut-and-dried-prawn gravy, with cockles, prawns and a fistful of laksa leaf.

Fonte

Ricetta di Singapore Peranakan (Nyonya) kitchens · 🏺 Tradizionale · Peranakan home cooking in Singapore — Chinese settler households remade with Malay spice, around Katong and Joo Chiat

Singapore Peranakan dish · Katong, Marine Parade — An ownerless dish, so no cook is credited. The canonical reference confirms the defining feature — 'the entire dish can be eaten with a spoon alone, without chopsticks or a fork, as the noodles are normally cut up into smaller pieces' — and that Katong is a residential precinct in Marine Parade, central Singapore. It describes the orange-yellow spicy stock flavoured with coconut milk and dried shrimp, and notes that 'laksa' may derive from a Chinese term meaning 'spicy sand', after the gritty texture the ground dried shrimp give. It also records that brothers Ng Juat Swee (known as 'Janggut') and Ng Chwee Seng hawked Peranakan-style laksa from the 1940s and moved into a coffee shop at 49 East Coast Road in 1950; that is recorded as the local origin story and is stated here as such, not as a claim of sole authorship — several Katong stalls dispute which is the original. Quantities are this book's own.

Background on Wikipedia ↗

Watch it being made · 3 videos

The Meatmen Channel Chef Elizabeth Haigh Burpple

⏱ 80 min🍽 4 porzioni🔥 610 kcal🇸🇬 Singapore🌶️🌶️

PescetarianoSenza latticini

Passaggi

Fry the prawn shells and heads in 2 tablespoons of oil until they turn deep orange and smell sweet, about 4 minutes. Add 1.2 litres of water, simmer 25 minutes, then strain and press the shells hard.
💡 This stock is the difference between a decent laksa and a memorable one, and it costs you nothing but the shells you were going to bin.
Blend the soaked chillies, shallots, garlic, lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, candlenuts, belacan and drained dried shrimp into a fine paste.
💡 Blend it finer than feels necessary. A coarse rempah leaves fibrous threads of lemongrass in a gravy that is meant to be spooned.
Fry the paste in the remaining oil over medium-low heat for 20 minutes, until it darkens to brick red and a pool of red oil separates at the edge of the pan.
💡 That separated oil is the finish line. Until you see it, the rempah still tastes raw underneath the coconut milk.
Pour in the prawn stock, simmer 10 minutes, then add the coconut milk, salt and sugar. Keep it just below a simmer for 5 minutes and do not let it boil.
💡 Boiled coconut milk splits into oil and curd. Once it is in, the pot never gets a rolling boil again.
Poach the prawns and fishcake in the gravy for 2 minutes and lift them out. Blanch the bean sprouts 20 seconds and the cockles 20 seconds separately.
Cook the noodles, drain, and cut them into 4 cm lengths with scissors. Divide between four bowls, ladle the gravy over, and top with prawns, fishcake, cockles, sprouts, half an egg, a heap of shredded laksa leaf and a teaspoon of sambal.
💡 Hand out spoons and no chopsticks. That is not a gimmick — it is the whole identity of this particular laksa.

💡 Consigli

Cut the noodles. It sounds trivial and it is the entire point: Katong laksa is defined by the fact that the whole bowl can be eaten with a spoon alone, because the noodles are cut into short pieces.
Katong is a real place — a residential precinct in the Marine Parade area of eastern Singapore. The dish is named after the neighbourhood, not a family.
Overlap, stated plainly: this belongs to the same coconut laksa family as Malaysia's curry laksa, already in this book, and laksa as a whole is shared across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and beyond. What is specifically Singaporean here is the Katong form — the cut noodles, the spoon and the heavy hand with laksa leaf. Malaysia's sour, coconut-free Penang asam laksa is a different dish again.
The rempah keeps a week in the fridge under its own oil and freezes for months. It is 80% of the work.