Cendol - an Asia dessert.

What's a cendol? Or chendol - both spellings are used, either one correct or wrong depending on who you ask (I seem to see more ‘chendol’ in Singapore. Not going to go anywhere near the origin story…) At its basic, cendol is a cold and refreshing dessert based on a combination of a base of shaved ice covered in coconut milk and gula melaka (brown palm sugar, usually from the palmyra palm - the ones with fan leaves, standing proud and true in the rice paddies you'll see travelling through South-East Asia), plus a portion of the sweet, jelly-like, green cendol strips (the green worms) from which the pudding gets the name. 

The cendol themselves, more like otherwordly alien elvers than loamy worms, are made from rice slow cooked with pandan leaves (they contribute the vanilla-like flavour and green colour) and gula melaka to make a jelly that is then pressed through a strainer. 

Cendol topped with durian (front) and with attap and jackfruit (back); Ye Tang Chendol, Beauty World, Singapore. 

It's a a true 'planty' pudding, as on top of the original, or basic, cendol of those three fundamentals, it's possible to have a combination of all sorts of different toppings, usual ones include red bean, attap (immature fruits of the mangrove palm), durian, jackfruit, creamed corn, mango, grass jelly etc.

After getting the cendol, then how to eat it...do you mix it all together? Or gently slice down the ice and topping mountain spoonful by spoonful? 

Cendol topped with sweetened creamed corn, and the shaved ice doused in gula melaka; Nyonya Chendol, Bukit Timah Food Centre, Dec. 2023

Rice sheets or cheong fun.

Sometimes it's the most simple things that allow a restaurant, cafe or food stall, to be judged. Apart from the obvious things such as dirty cutlery or scuttling cockroaches, there will be something on the menu, a 'simple' classic, that gives away the skill and quality of the chef or cook. For me, it’s the cheong fun, 腸粉, rice noodle roll. If done well, the noodle roll should be thin but thick enough to hold the shape, pure white (yet translucent at the edges) and glossy, soft and silky (but with some bite), and freshly cooked off the steamer served up hot and plump with quality fillings - usually fresh prawn or char sui pork. Hot soy based sauce is poured over before serving. If done poorly, it’s granular, stodgy, thick and cold, with insipid flat, dull fillings. Always order a plate when having dim sum to get an idea of the kitchen. 

O is for omelette.

omelette (also omelet) a dish of beaten eggs cooked in a frying-pan and served plain or with a savoury or sweet filling [French omelette, obsolete amellete by metathesis from alumette variant of alumelle from lemele knife-blade from Latin lamella]. Concise Oxford Dictionary.

The key thing is the beating. After that, how that egg mixture is cooked can be very different...

In Thailand, an omelette is ไข่เจียว (kai jiaw), where เจียว is a variant of 'to fry' in that a stirring motion is used (but is not scrambled), rather than ไข่ดาว (literally, egg-star) which is a fried egg (to be placed on top of some fried rice). A Thai omelette has crispy, bubbly, golden edges where the egg mixture has been cooked in quite a lot of very hot oil in a very hot wok so it bubbles and spits on entry. (Or, it can also be cooked and folded in a large, soft pillow.) The technique, ingredients and quantity of oil to perfect this, is more difficult than it sounds and needs (I imagine) several years of practice to get it golden brown (not burnt), bubbly (not dense), crispy (not soft), and without too much oil clinging to the finished omelette. But when done perfectly, using plump crab meat for example, served with soft and steaming white rice with a generous splash of prik nahm pla (พริกน้ำปลา), it is a dish of simple complexity.

Se'i babi (Timor smoked pork).

Throughout Timor (the Indonesian side at least) restaurants and food stalls were selling se'i babi - smoked then grilled strips of pork. The pork was smoked using leaves and twigs from Schleichera oleosa, called the kusum or Ceylon oak in the subcontinent, and a member of the soapberry family (Sapindaceae).

Flowering twig and young leaves of Schleichera oleosa

The pork is smoked early in the day (pagi pagi) in time for the lunch time rush. Strips of the pork fillet are then grilled on poles of kusum, over kusum charcoal and covered with a kusum twig - all to add a little extra flavour. It was served as strips on a chopping board with a sharp knife to be cut as you wish, some white rice and sambal. The meat was excellent, like very chunky smoked bacon, but more succulent, and we ate it nearly every day, but I never tired of it.

Pork being grilled, kusum branch in the chef's hand

The se'i babi was particularly good at 'Depot Joy' in Soe, served with sop brenebon (a broth with pork and brown beans), bunga pepaya (fried papaya flowers) and deep fried pork skin.

Deep fried pig skin at Depot Joy

Jus alpokat. Again.

When should the jus alpokat tourist visit Indonesia? In Biak in November and December 2010 there were avocados everywhere, but in Bali and Timor in August 2011 there were hardly any to be had, and jus alpokat was extremely difficult to find. In Timor, the avocado trees were in full flower and many had small fruits on the trees - these small fruits being the size of the ripe avocados sold in the UK. Indonesian avocados can quite much bigger - the size of a small cabbage, and when ripe rattle as the stone (the single seed) becomes loose inside. In the UK I don't think I've ever rattled an avocado, just given them a gentle squeeze, and when ripe they can be a bit 'mushy' which may be due to the fruits being picked and shipped when unripe and thus ripened 'off the tree'.

Avocado flowers.

In Timor at the night market (Pasir Panjang, Kupang), I watched the fruit juice stall and this was their recipe (though formula is probably a better term for a smoothie). The juice was a bit weak. Either the fruit was too small and there was too much ice, or the fruit was too early to have any great flavour - experimenting with good ripe fruit and the amount of ice will get it just right.

1 avocado (a bit small, an early 'lowland' fruit)

about 2 large dollops (tablespoons?) of condensed milk (the normal kind)

about 2-3 tablespoons of sugar

ice of an equivalent volume to the avocado

Blended together till very smooth (this took longer than I expected) and served in glasses lined with a swirl of chocolate condensed milk - perhaps chocolate ice cream sauce may work (I've never seen chocolate condensed milk on sale in the UK).

Sunset, Kupang.

Eating properly.

We slaughter animals, we catch fish, and we eat them. And in the West we eat the meaty, juicy, clean and easy bits. If we eat properly then it shouldn't just be chicken breasts, pork fillet and sirloin steaks on our plates. Eating properly is about learning to eat and appreciate a greater range of food items: chickens' feet, beef tendons, congealed blood, pig intestines, stomachs, and bone marrow are all foods I've enjoyed many times in Hong Kong and Thailand for example, but really have to hunt for in the UK. Beef tendons are so delicious why don't we eat them here in the UK? With beef brisket and vermicelli in noodle soup ('ngau lam mei fun' would be a Cantonese approximation) or fried with flat broad noodles ('hore fun'), the tendons elevate them to another level to be wonderful dishes with the juicy chunks of tendon - like jewels of Marmite jelly - glistening and nestling within the noodles. My palette has lost the yearning for these things, and to eat properly again, rather than going on an offal hunt (in rather expensive places in the UK for example), it would be far better to re-educate it with a prolonged stay somewhere in Asia.

Jus alpokat.

This green sludge is jus alpokat, or avocado juice to give it a basic translation from the Indonesian. (Advokat or alpukat are also Indonesian for avocado, though the first one can mean lawyer, and lawyer juice doesn't sound very enticing.)


I don't know how it is made, but at a guess it is something like an avocado, lots of condensed milk, and ice blended together; the brown streaks are chocolate condensed milk. I don't really care how it is made, but I think it is delicious. It's perfect with anything that has some spicy sambal, is a great stomach liner before something a bit oily, or is so versatile it can be a pudding at the end of the meal; highly recommended.

PS. Incredulously, the Lonely Planet Indonesia guide lists avocado juice in a list of four "We Dare You...specialities that make for a real culture shock" (together with dog in Sulawesi, durian, and Balinese pork offal specialities), which is just silly because whilst it's not everyone's cup of tea it's hardly different from very sloppy gaucomole.