Pamelia Chia's Blog

We’re on the last leg of summer — it’s still beautiful and sunny, but the weather’s definitely cooling down now. I want to make the most of summer while we can, so I’ve been buying the best-looking cherry tomatoes I can get my hands on whenever I make a trip to the supermarket. And when you have tomatoes so sweet, one of the best things to do with them is make tomato sambal. Unlike other types of sambal that I typically make at home, you don’t need a blender to make tomato sambal. It is, after all, a rustic sambal whose allure lies, at least in part, in its texture.

The idea is that, rather than rendering the vegetables and aromatics to a smooth paste in a blender, you cut everything roughly — small enough that they soften easily, but not so small that you lose textural interest. After cutting, I place the ingredients in a pan wide enough to accomodate them in a single layer and drizzle in some olive oil. A few years ago, I would have shuddered at the thought of olive oil in sambal, but ever since my trip to Croatia last year, where I learned that olive oil isn’t nearly as delicate as I’d imagined, I’ve been replacing my usual vegetable oil with it. It’s better for you (not inconsequential, given the abundance of oil in sambals) and the flavour of the olive oil is surprisingly unobtrusive.

After 10 minutes of stir-frying, the tomatoes burst and give up their juices, while the onions and chillies become tender. I take the pan off the heat and start grinding the vegetables with a pestle until I arrive at a consistency that I like. This was easy because my pan, being made of cast-iron, is textured. You could also use a cobek and ulekan (pestle and mortar that is shallow and wide enough to facilitate this type of grinding). You don’t want everything to be a smooth homogenous mixture, but a sort of chunky relish that you can spoon over everything.

Once the texture is to your liking, all that’s left to do is season the sambal. Because the tomatoes I had were so naturally sweet, the only seasonings required for mine were tamarind pulp for tanginess, and salt. At this stage, I also taste to see if the sambal is spicy enough for my liking. If it isn’t, I stir in some finely sliced bird’s eye chilli. To me, that’s a more sensible approach than starting a sambal off with bird’s eye chillies and then realising after cooking that the resulting sambal is too spicy.

There are many ways to enjoy tomato sambal: as a dip for raw crunchy vegetables like cucumber, spooned over boiled or grilled vegetables, or as a condiment for meat and fish. I coated some fish fillets in flour, fried them in a bit of olive oil until golden brown on both sides. I then added salted butter and curry powder to the pan (spice blends like ras el hanout also work well) and basted the fish with this fragrant butter. Spooned the tomato sambal over and topped with a handful of chopped coriander. Delicious with rice.

Tomato sambal
Makes a jam jar’s worth | Vegan option

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Since I moved to the Netherlands, I’ve been teaching cooking workshops. Most of the time, people who sign up are there for a company team bonding session, a bachelorette party, or celebrating a family member’s birthday. The focus is not so much about the food, and more about allowing food and cooking to be the conduit to having a wonderful time. I really enjoy the social element of it, but recently, I went for a few events that made me realise how much I miss grounding food in stories, personal histories, and cultural exploration.

Late July, I was invited by a chef friend Leow Shichao for a very special private dinner. For years, he’s been on a journey of rediscovering his Hakka roots through food (you can follow along here), and this time, he was in the Netherlands for a few events. This dinner was a collaboration between him and a Surinamese Hakka Pearl Tjin, author of Thuis in de Hakka Chinese Keuken. Prior to the dinner, I was frankly unaware that a Surinamese Hakka community existed!

Some of what we enjoyed:

Abacus seeds: An emblematic Hakka dish where taro is steamed and formed into a dough with tapioca starch, before being shaped individually to resemble the seeds of an abacus. A popular dish to serve for Lunar New Year as the auspicious shape of the abacus seeds symbolises good fortune.

Salt-baked chicken: A whole bird is wrapped and buried beneath a heap of scalding hot coarse salt. Apart from the cooking technique, what makes the dish special is the use of sand ginger. Once cooked, the bird is chopped up, but here it was reimagined: shredded then served atop a lettuce cup with garnishes of Surinamese pickles, fried shallots, and fried garlic.

Hakka chicken soup: Made with home-fermented glutinous rice wine in the Singaporean context, but we enjoyed it with Madeira wine this time, as per Surinamese Hakka tradition.

Stuffed pork belly: A show-stopper of a dish, this was a whole roulade of pork belly stuffed with dried goodies such as lap cheong and dried shrimp, and slow-roasted.

Hakka yong tau foo: Meaning “stuffed tofu”, the stuffing for Hakka yong tau foo is usually pork mince. However, since mince of half pork and half beef is more common in Dutch supermarkets, that’s what Pearl and Shichao used to make their version.

Beyond the food, what I especially loved was the intimate setting and how it allowed for stories to be shared — not only from Shichao and Pearl, but also among guests.

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A few days later, I had my book signing event at Lion City restaurant in Rotterdam. It was a Q&A session centered on food traditions, migration, and identity. It’s been awhile since I’ve done a book event, and it was lovely getting to meet so many from the diasporic community who share similar experiences. Thanks for everybody who turned up for the event!

Get PlantAsia here!

I picked up salsa dancing as a hobby at the start of the year, and my friends decided to organise a potluck party yesterday. The weather’s beautiful, so it was a great time to spend time in the balcony and share some finger food.

I brought pani puri which is, in my mind, the perfect party food. The two words that make up the name of the dish refer to the two core components: “puri” is the vessel, and “pani” (or “water”) refers to the fragrant herb water that you’re meant to fill the puri with. Alongside the herb water, I also prepared a boiled potato filling seasoned with chaat masala, a tamarind date chutney, and yoghurt thinned with water to a runnier consistency.

The idea is to crack a hole with your thumb in the crisp shell, fill it with potato, spoon (or squeeze if you use a squeeze bottle like me) in some chutney and yogurt, saturate the puri with the herb water, then pop the whole thing in your mouth in one bite.

It is vegetarian, or vegan without the yogurt — so it’s perfect for those with dietary restrictions. As for the prep, it does take a bit of work, but everything can be prepared in advance, including the puri shells. I bought the dehydrated coins of dough from the Indian grocer and once fried, these stay crisp for a long time. It is such a fun and interactive dish, where everyone gets to assemble it together and, in so doing, break the ice.

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Pani puri
Serves 6 | Vegan option

For the date chutney:
80g tamarind pulp + 160ml water
100g date paste (**you can also use dried dates; just soak them in boiling water till soft, before removing the pits. Discard the soaking liquid.)
1 teaspoon chilli powder, or to taste
1/2 teaspoon cumin powder
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Salt and honey to taste

For the herb water:
500ml water
2 green chillies, deseeded and roughly chopped
2.5cm piece of ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
1 lemon’s juice
1/2 tablespoon honey
1 large handful of mint leaves
1 bunch of coriander (stems and leaves)
1/2 teaspoon salt

For the filling:
4 large potatoes, peeled and boiled
1/2 red onion, chopped
1 bunch of coriander (stems and leaves), chopped
2 tablespoons chaat masala, or to taste
Salt to taste

For the assembly:
Oil for deep-frying
A packet of dried puri (if you prefer to make this from scratch, there’s a recipe in my cookbook Wet Market to Table)
200g yoghurt, thinned with water if necessary to a pouring consistency (optional)

Make the date chutney: In a bowl, combine the tamarind pulp and water and knead the pulp with your fingers to dissolve. Pass it through a sieve set over a small blender and discard the seeds. Add the date paste, chilli powder, cumin powder, and lemon juice. Blend until smooth. Taste and add salt and honey to taste.

Make the herb water: Place all the ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. Transfer to a pitcher.

Make the filling: In a large bowl, mash the potatoes. Mix in the onion, coriander, chaat masala, and salt to taste.

Fry the puri: Heat the oil for deep-frying in a pan. Test the oil by adding one puri; it should float and puff almost instantly. Fry the puri in batches, submerging them into the oil with a kitchen spider from time to time. When they are puffed and golden, transfer them to a paper towel-lined dish.

Assemble the pani puri: To serve, crack a hole in each puri with your thumb. Stuff the cavity with the filling three-quarters of the way up. Spoon in a bit of date chutney and yogurt as desired, then pour some herb water into the cavity. Pop the whole thing in your mouth immediately and enjoy!

Welcome back to the Singapore Noodles newsletter! Before we get to this week’s recipe, two small announcements:

Book event in Rotterdam: I’ll be signing books and speaking about food heritage at Lion City in Rotterdam on 2 August 2026 (12:00-15:30). The event is free — to sign up, reserve your spot via the Lion City website. I’ll have my cookbooks Wet Market to Table and PlantAsia available for purchase.

Final copies of PlantAsia in Singapore: If you’ve been enjoying these weekly newsletters, you’ll probably enjoy my second cookbook PlantAsia: A Vegetarian Journey Through Asia as well. The original edition is still available for purchase and won’t be reprinted once the current stock is sold. Order your copy here.

Thank you for reading, and now onto this week’s recipe.

NAAN

Derived from the Persian word for bread (nān), naan is a flatbread that is spotted with smoky blisters, and slathered all over with melted ghee fresh from the oven. According to Preena Chauhan and Arvinda Chauhan’s New Indian Basics, naan was brought to India by the Moghuls from Central Asia. The locals bake the bread in a tandoor oven, a traditional piece of cooking vessel in Indian cooking which can reach incredibly high temperatures. The dough is stretched then slapped along the inner wall of this ferociously hot clay container, resulting in rapid puffing and charring. When torn into, it boasts a crumb that is pillowy yet chewy, blistered yet tender.

THE DOUGH

Naan is made with maida, which is a refined wheat flour. The closest supermarket substitute is plain flour. This is ideal compared to bread flour because for naan, you’re looking for enough gluten for stretch and structure, but not so much that it becomes tough. I use all-purpose flour of 10% protein content.

The next ingredient comes as no surprise: yeast. Naan is leavened bread, and it is the fermentation which gives naan its characteristic soft, airy texture and complex flavour.

Beyond the usual flour, yeast, salt, and water that you’ll encounter in almost all bread recipes, naan is notable for containing dairy. Yogurt is a common ingredient in many recipes, contributing mild tanginess and complexity, but more importantly fat. Fat coats flour proteins, weakening gluten formation and resulting in a more tender flatbread.

As an experiment, I made three different doughs:

Dough 1 (Flour, water, Greek yogurt, salt, sugar, dry yeast): A fairly lean dough that serves as the baseline.

Dough 2 (With oil added): Fat helps keep naan soft and pliable rather than stiff and crisp. By adding oil alongside the yogurt, I wanted to see how much I could inhibit gluten development and produce an even softer dough.

Dough 3 (With oil and baking soda added): Although traditional naan is leavened with yeast, baking soda appears in many modern recipes. It reacts with the acidic yogurt to release carbon dioxide, creating additional bubbles that contribute to a lighter, airier texture. It also partially neutralises the yogurt’s acidity. By raising the pH, baking soda can reduce some of the tightening effect that acidity has on gluten.

COOKING

A tandoor cooks naan at extremely high temperatures — this intense heat is what creates oven spring and blistering. I’ve seen some home recipes that try to replicate this with a regular oven, but a domestic oven simply doesn’t get hot enough to achieve the same effect. A thoroughly preheated pan is a better option. It is essential to heat the pan thoroughly so that you get maximum blisters and puffing. A hot pan also means that you prevent overcooking and thus dryness as much as possible, while maximising char.

I’ve seen a method on Youtube, where the dough is moistened on one side so that it sticks to the pan and cooked until the dough bubbles and puffs. The pan is then flipped upside down over the flame so that you get nice colouring all over the flatbread rather than only on the blisters. I find this method overly complicated and not effective when using a non-stick pan because the dough slides off. A cast-iron pan works better, but the pan is too heavy and unwieldy to flip. I much prefer cooking the naan on both sides in the pan, then swiping the flatbread over a flame to replicate the tandoor naan look.

The most delicious part of naan is the butter that’s slathered all over it while it is still piping hot. You could use regular melted butter, but a compound butter makes it ten times more delicious. I went with finely grated garlic and chopped coriander leaves. Using a butter you love is also key — mine is Kerrygold.

THE RESULTS
All three doughs tasted great, reminding me of restaurant naan flavour-wise. I loved that so much flavour was present in the naan with so little effort. That said, there were noticeable differences in texture between the three doughs:

Dough 1 was chewy, almost dry.

Dough 2 had a good balance of tenderness and chew. Wex’s favourite.

Dough 3 was the softest, almost shreddy and cake-like. My favourite.

I also experimented with allowing the doughs to ferment overnight in the refrigerator instead of at room temperature. They did not taste much more complex from the overnight rise, but it is nice to have that option of cooking the naan on another day if you don’t have the time for it. We enjoyed the naan for dinner with butter chicken and roasted vegetables and it was a cracking meal.

Naan
Makes 10 naan

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Welcome back to the Singapore Noodles newsletter! Before we get to this week’s recipe, a note on PlantAsia. If you’ve been enjoying these weekly deep dives into recipes, techniques, and food history, you’ll probably enjoy PlantAsia as well. The book follows the same curiosity — combining recipes with stories, ingredients, and the cultural traditions behind them. The original self-published edition is still available on my website. Once the remaining copies in Singapore are gone, I won’t be replenishing stock, and this edition will not be reprinted.

Order the original edition

Thank you for reading, and now onto this week’s recipe.

TARO TOAST

In Singapore, the national breakfast is kaya toast — toast filled with eggy, pandan-scented curd and shards of cold salted butter. The textures are lovely together: a single slice of bread toasted until it is so crunchy it is almost cracker-like, the oozing kaya, and smooth slabs of butter usually thick enough to leave teethmarks. Since moving abroad about 8 years ago, I’ve noticed a modern interpretation appearing in cafés which features a taro spread (orh nee 芋泥) instead.

Taro is an edible corm. It has ivory flesh with purple striations which, when steamed, has a powdery mouthfeel and sweet earthiness that works well in both savoury dishes and desserts. It is the star ingredient in orh nee, a traditional Teochew dessert where steamed taro is rendered into a luxuriously smooth paste with sugar and lard or shallot oil. While the traditional accompaniments for orh nee are pumpkin puree, fried shallots, and gingko nuts, some eateries also serve it with lashings of coconut milk.

Making taro spread is easy. I sliced up the frozen taro I’d bought from the Asian supermarket and steamed it until fork tender. While the taro steamed, I infused some water with pandan leaves. I then blended the taro with the pandan-infused water, sugar, oil, and salt. While the quantity of sugar to add is up to you, for the purposes of taro toast, I recommend a higher amount to approximate the sweetness of kaya. I stir in coconut cream at the end; if you blend coconut cream, sometimes it can lead to an off-smell from the coconut heating up and breaking down.

All that’s left to do is to simmer the mixture until it reaches your desired consistency. For maximum ooziness, I’ve kept it quite runny — just until you can see the bottom of the pot as you stir. Refrigerate the spread until it is thoroughly chilled.

For the taro toast, any sandwich bread will do — white or brown both work. The key is to toast it really well and cut off the crusts. Slice it in half with a serrated knife and slather the taro spread generously on both sides. Top with as much butter as you dare. It is important that the butter is good quality (I like Kerrygold). Close the sandwich and slice it in half to expose the oozing cross-section and enjoy.

Taro toast
Makes about 1/2 jam jar’s worth

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Welcome back to the Singapore Noodles newsletter! Before we get to this week’s recipe, a note on PlantAsia. If you’ve been enjoying these weekly deep dives into recipes, techniques, and food history, you’ll probably enjoy PlantAsia as well. The book follows the same curiosity — combining recipes with stories, ingredients, and the cultural traditions behind them. The original self-published edition is still available on my website. Once the remaining copies in Singapore are gone, I won’t be replenishing stock, and this edition will not be reprinted.

Order the original edition

Thank you for reading, and now onto this week’s recipe.

SCALLION PANCAKES 葱油饼

The pleasant weather of late has meant that our garden is now in full bloom. Our spring onions, in particular, are thriving, so Wex proposed some scallion pancakes. These are not true pancakes in the Western sense — they are studded with sliced spring onions, and come closer to crisp flatbreads with tissue-thin, tender layers within.

Like other food items that involve simple ingredient lists and cooking techniques, scallion pancakes go so far back in time that it is difficult to pinpoint their origin. That said, Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods by Grace Lin suggests a connection to Shanghai. As a trading port with a large population of South Asian descent, the flaky, layered scallion pancake might have emerged here, inspired by the paratha that the Indian immigrants were accustomed to eating.

Unlike paratha, scallion pancake traditionally relies on a hot water dough. The goal is to achieve a dough that is easy to roll out, so that you get lots of thin, tender layers within each pancake. Adding boiling water to flour limits the formation of gluten, which is what causes toughness and elasticity.

Another way to reduce gluten presence in the dough is to use flour of a lower protein content. In fact, many recipes for scallion pancake online call for a mix of cake flour and plain flour. Unfortunately, cake flour isn’t at all common here in the Netherlands, so I replaced part of the flour mix with cornstarch, which contains no protein.

Once the dough is made, it has to rest overnight in the refrigerator so that the gluten has a chance to relax. Given the long rest in the refrigerator, brushing the surface with oil is key to prevent the surface of the dough from drying out.

Scallion pancakes are a sort of laminated pastry — the dough is rolled out into a thin sheet, then fat and spring onion is spread all over, and the sheet is then rolled up and coiled to create many thin layers. I’ve seen two approaches: the first distributes oil and fresh spring onion between the layers, while the other uses an “oil roux” (油酥). At its core, the oil roux is flour scalded with hot oil, resulting in a thin, fragrant paste that can be spread over the dough. For fragrance, the spring onion can be added to the mixture to be scalded as well.

I was curious about the differences between the two approaches, so I prepared two pancakes using the same dough — one layered with oil and fresh spring onion, and the other with the spring onion-infused oil roux.

Once fried, the results were astounding. The pancake with fresh spring onions didn’t roll out into as neat a circle compared to the pancake with the oil roux, and the flavour of spring onion was greener and more pungent — which could be a good thing, depending on your personal preference. That said, the layers stuck together rather than being separated, so the overall texture was tougher and gummier.

The pancake with the oil roux really surprised me — the presence of flour allowed the layers to be clearly defined and the the pancake was super crispy and pastry-like. That said, the spring onion flavour was a little more subtle. This was an easy fix: I added some chopped fresh spring onion to the wilted spring onion and oil roux mixture for a stronger fragrance without the spring onion getting in the way of rolling the dough out.

Scallion pancakes vary widely in thickness, depending on the variant (thicker pancakes offer a chewier, more substantial bite). I experimented with two different thicknesses: thin (with the pancake measuring approximately 24cm across), and thick (13cm across). While thin pancakes could simply be fried uncovered on both sides until they turned brown and crisp, the thicker ones had to be cooked covered and over low heat, so that they could cook through thoroughly. For the latter, it was crucial for the oil roux to be spread thinly to avoid a sandy mouthfeel.

In the end, my preference is for the thinner pancakes. Once you have them rolled out between parchment sheets, you could freeze them if not enjoying immediately. Simply pop them into a pan with a bit of oil, over low heat, without defrosting.

Scallion pancakes 葱油饼
Makes 6 pancakes | Vegan

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Before I get to this week’s recipe, I want to share an update on my second cookbook, PlantAsia: A Vegetarian Cookbook Through Asia. I published PlantAsia in 2023 because I believe that part of eating sustainably is reducing our overconsumption of meat. As someone who does eat meat, I wanted to explore the ways in which Asian cuisines make vegetables as delicious and satisfying.

What began as a self-published passion project has since found readers around the world, and last year I signed with a publisher to bring a new global edition to bookstores internationally.

It’s been incredibly rewarding to see the book take on a new life. But it also means that the original edition — the one I independently created, edited, and published — is approaching its final chapter. There are now just 175 copies remaining in Singapore, and once these are gone, I will not be reprinting this edition.

If you’ve been meaning to add PlantAsia to your bookshelf, or if you’d like to own the original edition that started this journey, order it while stocks last (free shipping for Singaporean addresses).

Whether you bought the book, cooked from the ebook, or have simply followed along on this journey, thank you. Your support has made it possible for this self-published cookbook to grow into something bigger than I’d imagined.

TEMPURA SOBA

We’re right smack in the middle of a heatwave right now. You’d think that as people who grew up in Singapore, we would be adjusting better to this sudden spurt of heat but we’re not! For one, air-conditioning in homes and public spaces are the norm; and two, after having living in the Netherlands for the past three years, our bodies are now slightly more adapted to the cold. In the absence of an air-conditioning unit at home, the way we’ve been coping is through chilled beverages and meals.

I am a huge fan of cold / cool noodles, such as this chicken rice-inspired glass noodles and cold noodles with peanut butter dressing. Recently, for dinner, we had tempura soba, which was not only a way to beat the heat, but also a way to clear my fridge of all the bits and bobs of vegetables I had.

Funnily enough, I couldn’t find tempura flour at the Asian supermarket or regular supermarket, so I made my own really quickly with pantry ingredients and it turned out well. The main thing to note is that the batter should be closer to the consistency of heavy cream than pancake batter, so that it fries up as a wispy coating than a thick shell. Deep-fried food might be the last thing on your mind in hot weather, but tempura is so light and delicate that it doesn’t weigh you down, and it’s absolutely delicious when dipped briefly in that iced sauce.

Tempura soba
Serves 2

For the soba and sauce:
200g mirin
120g soy sauce
1 teaspoon dashi powder
Squeeze of lemon or yuzu juice
400g cold water
2 bundles dried soba

For the tempura:
Oil, for deep-frying
125g plain flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
240g sparkling water
1 egg yolk
A few shelled prawns, deveined (score the underside to prevent from curling up)
Assorted vegetables of your choice, such as a few pumpkin slices, shimeiji clusters, trimmed French beans, bite-size pieces of eggplant etc.

For serving:
Thinly sliced spring onion
A handful of ice cubes
Wasabi paste (optional)

Make the sauce: In a bowl, combine the mirin, soy sauce, dashi powder, lemon or yuzu juice, and cold water. Place in the refrigerator to chill.

Boil the soba: Fill a pot with salted water and bring it to the boil. Add the soba and cook for 2 minutes, or until al dente. Drain and rinse in cool running tapwater to get rid of excess starch. Drain very well and set aside.

Prepare the tempura: In a wide saucepan, heat the oil for deep-frying. In a bowl, whisk together the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, salt, sparkling water, and egg yolk to form a watery batter that still coats your finger when you dip it inside. When the oil is hot, dip the prawns in the batter, allowing excess to drip off, then add them to the pan. When golden and crispy, transfer the prawns to paper towels to drain. Repeat this with the vegetables.

To serve: Arrange the vegetables attractively on a sharing platter. Divide the soba between two serving bowls (if the soba sticks together, rinse and drain again). Top with the spring onion. Pour over the sauce and add the ice cubes. Serve with wasabi and the tempura on the side (they are delicious dipped into the sauce).

If you’re in the Netherlands...

I’ll be signing books and speaking about food heritage at Lion City in Rotterdam on 2 August 2026 (12:00-15:30). The event is free to attend — to sign up, reserve your spot via the Lion City website. I’ll have copies of both my cookbooks (Wet Market to Table and PlantAsia) available, and you’re also very welcome to bring along your own copy for signing. See you there!

Welcome to Singapore Noodles, a newsletter where I share recipes from my kitchen in the Netherlands. Archived recipes and other content can be found via the index. My cookbooks, Wet Market to Table and PlantAsia: Asia’s Vegetable Wisdom in Recipes, Stories, and Techniques, are available for purchase. Thank you for being here, and enjoy this week’s post! ✨ — Pamelia

AVOCADO CAKE

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I love tres leches cake. Let me count the ways. One, it is guaranteed to be moist because the cake is drenched with a combination of three milks (evaporated, condensed, and regular) and left to soak overnight for maximal absorption. Two, it keeps terrifically in the refrigerator, making it the perfect do-ahead dessert. Three, for something so lush, it is very light since the cake is a sponge — the perfect dessert for warm weather.

I’ve published recipes of several versions of tres leches cake now: a soursop and passionfruit version in my first cookbook, and more recently a pandan version sprinkled with inti (a rich, caramelised mixture of grated coconut cooked with palm sugar). I want to introduce my new favourite: the avocado tres leches cake. At the sound of avocado in a cake, some of you might screw your face in disgust because you are so familiar with avocado in a savoury context. I, however, grew up associating avocado more with sweet treats in Singapore.

Fruit juice stalls are ubiquitous in hawker centres, and while my go-to was the ABC (a blend of apple, beet, and carrot), very occasionally, I’d splurge and get the more expensive avocado milkshake. This is a tall iced goblet of avocado blended with evaporated milk and condensed milk, and it is a drink enjoyed not only in Singapore, but also its neighbouring countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia. It’s absolutely delicious, the slightly vegetal and buttery quality of avocado enhanced by the sweet dairy. Unlike most popular avocado desserts you might encounter today — such as avocado chocolate mousse — the avocado is not hidden, but brought to the fore.

For the cake itself, I made the same sponge as the one in my pandan tres leches — you need the green sponge to convincingly sell this cake as an avocado cake. And besides, avocado goes beautifully with flavours of coconut and pandan. For the avocado cream that I used to frost the cake, I simply blitzed a perfectly ripe avocado with mascarpone and the barest touch of icing sugar. It frosted like a dream.

Not everything went to plan and the pan actually slid off the glasses it was resting on while cooling, so the cake had a huge dent. I was devastated but continued to soak and frost the cake as planned, and was pleased at how presentable it still managed to look: which is only testament to how forgiving of a cake tres leches is. When I took a bite, I was immediately transported back to those sweltering days in Singapore with a glass of avo milkshake in hand.

Our guests raved about the cake and I even got the following text the next day. There’s no higher compliment!

Avocado Tres Leches Cake
Makes a 22.5cm round cake

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Mochi is something that the students at my cooking classes get excited about. I don’t teach it at the moment, but I’ve had a few requests, which is surprising because mochi has a softly gelatinous and chewy texture that not everyone is a fan of. One of the most popular ways to enjoy it is as small sweet dumplings known as daifuku, where the dough is stretched around a filling of red bean paste, ice cream, cream, or fruit.

While Wex and I were in Germany camping last weekend, we spotted some beautiful strawberries and ended up splitting a box of eight punnets with friends. Because the strawberries were so ripe and perfumed, I thought that they would be perfect for ichigo daifuku, or strawberry and bean paste wrapped within a thin layer of mochi.

Ichigo daifuku is deceptively difficult to make. They look simple, but require attention to detail. With my first attempt, I didn’t pay attention to the orientation of the strawberries the mochi skin wasn’t evenly thick all around the filling, so the dumplings didn’t look very pretty when sliced. That said, I shared some with a friend who lives down the street, and she loved it. Her rave reviews convinced me that I was on the right track, and that it was worth making a second batch.

For my second attempt, in addition to refining the technique, I chose to go with a pistachio filling and finished the mochi with a light dusting of matcha. I was pleasantly surprised at how luscious it tasted — the pistachio filling oozed beautifully and complemented the juiciness of the strawberry perfectly.

THE BEAN / PISTACHIO FILLINGS

Ichigo daifuku is traditionally made with adzuki bean paste. Unfortunately, the bean paste from my local Asian supermarket is rather disappointing. The alternative was to make my own from scratch but frankly, I didn’t feel like cycling across town to buy dried adzuki beans, so I turned to an ingredient I always have in my pantry: canned red kidney beans.

I’ve made bean paste with canned black beans / red kidney beans in the past, such as for my red bean pancake. While it doesn’t taste the same as adzuki bean paste, for something that comes together in a fraction of the time, they are a great substitute.

Canned beans are incredibly quick to transform into a paste. Simply blend them with sugar and oil until smooth, then cook the mixture gently. As it heats, the starch granules in the beans absorb water and thicken the slurry into a spreadable paste. The key is to cook it until it holds its shape and you can see the bottom of the pan as you stir. Allow the paste to cool completely, as it will continue to thicken as it cools.

The pistachio filling is even simpler to make. All I did was blend the pistachios with icing sugar and honey until the mixture transformed from a fine rubble into a crumbly paste as the nuts began releasing their oils. To enhance the softness and pliability of the mixture, I added a little oil.

THE STRAWBERRIES

With ichigo daifuku, the size of strawberries matters. Smaller ones are ideal, as they will be encased in bean / pistachio paste and mochi. If they are too large, the ichigo daifuku loses its dainty appearance.

Because the pastes can be sticky, I found that the quickest and easiest way to wrap the strawberries is with a sheet of plastic. For the best presentation, keep the strawberry tips pointing upwards while wrapping and place them upright on a plate (the creases left by the plastic will also serve as a useful visual cue for the strawberry’s orientation).

THE MOCHI SKIN

The mochi skin is traditionally made with shiratamako or mochiko, Japanese glutinous rice flours made specifically from a wet-milling process. For accessibility, I went with generic glutinous rice flour — made by dry-milling raw glutinous rice to a fine powder — because it’s easier to source.

Most recipes I’ve seen call for cooking the mochi dough in the microwave, heating it in short bursts and mixing between each interval with a spatula. While effective, it can be difficult to control the cook of the mochi in a microwave. I resorted to cooking the dough on the stovetop, but the dough cooked rather unevenly because of how viscous and sticky it is. Eventually, I settled on steaming the slurry instead, which gave much more consistent results. The mochi is ready when it changes from bright white to slightly off-white and no longer has a powdery mouthfeel. The best way to check is to snip off a tiny piece from the centre and taste it.

WRAPPING

For other types of dumpling wrappers, I would typically weigh each portion of dough to ensure perfectly even pieces. However, mochi is so sticky that a different approach works better. I pat the dough into a rectangle on a tray dusted generously with cornstarch, then cut it into individual portions. To even out the thickness of each piece, I roll each portion out slightly before wrapping. I place the strawberry tip-side down on the mochi, gather the wrapper around the filling, and trim away any excess with kitchen scissors. This gives the daifuku a beautifully even layer of mochi all around.

Once wrapped, the ichigo daifuku will keep for a few days in an airtight container in the refrigerator, but is best eaten the day it is made, when the skin is the softest and delightfully chewy.

Ichigo daifuku
Makes 12 | Vegan

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Welcome to Singapore Noodles, a newsletter where I share recipes from my kitchen in the Netherlands. Archived recipes and other content can be found via the index. My cookbooks, Wet Market to Table and PlantAsia: Asia’s Vegetable Wisdom in Recipes, Stories, and Techniques, are available for purchase. Thank you for being here, and enjoy this week’s post! ✨ — Pamelia

JAPANESE CHEESECAKE

When I was growing up in Singapore, it was far more common to enjoy a spongy, airy cheesecake than a rich, dense one. This style of cheesecake — also known as cotton or soufflé cheesecake — was invented in the 1960s by Japanese pastry chef Tomotaro Kuzuno after tasting German cheesecake. Adapted to Japanese tastes, the cake involves whipping egg whites into a meringue and folding it into a cream cheese batter, then baked in a water bath so that the cake is cloud-like with a gentle wobble. Whether you ate it at room temperature or straight from the refrigerator, it was simultaneously ethereally airy, melt-in-your-mouth, and lushly creamy; like if a chiffon cake and cheesecake had a baby.

Japanese cheesecake was incredibly popular in Singapore in the ‘90s (and probably still is), and could be found in neighbourhood bakeries next to local breads and pastries. Its popularity in Singapore is unsurprising as it really is the perfect treat in blistering weather — light enough to not weigh you down, but rich enough to taste luxurious.

Getting its rise almost entirely from eggs, Japanese cheesecake can be a little finicky, but it is not much harder than making a chiffon cake (if you’ve made my pandan chiffon cake with success in the past, you wouldn’t have trouble with this cheesecake). For a long time, I’ve favoured making Basque cheesecake for its ease, but now that we’re in summer, Japanese cheesecake feels just right.

Cream cheese is what separates Japanese cheesecake from chiffon cake and other sponge cakes. It provides not just a source of fat, but also contributes to a custardy mouthfeel. It has to be warmed through for it to be incorporated into the batter — I warm it with butter and milk over the smallest flame in a saucepan. Some recipes specify using a bain-marie to do this, but it is not necessary as long as you are vigilant. The last thing you want is for the mixture to get too hot and split.

When everything looks smooth, I whisk in the sugar, salt, and egg yolks. The mixture should be the temperature of baby’s milk, not hot enough to scramble the eggs. For the smoothest finish, it’s best to pass this mixture through a sieve to catch any small clumps of cream cheese or thick strands of egg.

In terms of the starch in Japanese cheesecake, there are two: plain flour and cornstarch. Plain flour (used in a tiny quantity compared to a conventional cake) provides some structure so that it is sliceable like a cake. Cornstarch enhances the cake’s smooth, rich mouthfeel, but also plays the crucial role of keeping weeping to a minimum. Watery liquid exuding from cake happens when egg proteins are overcoagulated, such as when the cheesecake is baked too aggressively or for too long. Because cornstarch absorbs water and traps it in a gel when it gelatinises, it acts as a buffer and makes the mixture less prone to weeping.

Like chiffon cake, Japanese cheesecake relies upon an egg foam for its rise and structure, rather than on flour. Where the two cakes depart is the extent to which the whites are beaten. For chiffon cake, it is common for the whites to be beaten to medium-firm peaks because the chiffon batter is lighter, so the meringue has to hold structure and resist collapsing while the cake sets. For Japanese cheesecake, because it is a heavier batter with cream cheese and baked more gently, soft peaks are preferred to encourage gradual, gentle inflation. The egg whites get folded into the cream cheese mixture.

A low temperature-bake is essential for Japanese cheesecake, so that the eggs coagulate slowly, like the making of a delicate custard. In addition to a low temperature, a water bath is also necessary to coddle the custard and conduct heat evenly, thereby achieving a flat and uncracked top. Without one, the cake may set and contract on the outside while its centre is still expanding, leading to cracks or collapse. (To avoid water seeping into the batter while it is baking, wrapping the pan in layers of foil is paramount if you’re using a springform pan.)

There are many ways to ascertain doneness, such as the skewer test or the jiggle test, but the most reliable one is to use a thermometer. I aim for an internal temperature between 70-75°C. The cake’s surface should feel springy and soft and will not hold the indent of your finger when pressed.

The cooling of a foam-based sponge cake also takes as much care, because the fresh-from-the-oven cake contains a lot of trapped air and steam. As the cake is removed from the oven, the sudden temperature drop causes the gases to contract or condense into water while its structure still remains delicate. This causes the walls of the bubbles to get pulled inwards, leading to collapse. There are ways to circumvent this. Chiffon cake, for example, is typically flipped upside down to cool, so that the air cell structure is supported as the cake sets. Japanese cheesecake, being more custardy, cannot support its own weight upside down and will tear if inverted warm. Allowing the cake to cool in a turned-off oven allows the cake to cool gradually so that its structure has a chance to set while the gases escape.

With something as quietly perfect as Japanese cheesecake, I like to keep things very simple. As strawberries are in season now, I toss them in a bit of sugar and balsamic vinegar and let them macerate for 15 minutes or so, before serving them alongside the cake. Japanese cheesecake keeps well in the refrigerator for up to 3 days. Some people warm slices of it in the microwave so that it’s wobbly and fragrant, but I much prefer it well-chilled.

Japanese Cheesecake
Makes a 9” cheesecake

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It is always a treat to be invited to someone’s home to cook alongside them. Over the weekend, our Italian friends Fabio and Elisa had us over for dinner. Elisa said, if I wanted to, I could arrive a few hours earlier to watch her make gnocchi. I, of course, said yes.

I was first shown how to make gnocchi during a short stage at the restaurant Etta in Melbourne. That was my first taste of how incomparably light gnocchi could be when made with care. Supermarket gnocchi could never, and I raise my eyebrows whenever I see “springy” or “chewy” as a descriptor for gnocchi. During our recent trip to Italy, we ordered gnocchi on several occasions and were disappointed each time by how stodgy they were. I was ready for some good gnocchi and was curious about how an Italian would approach making it at home.

Elisa is a meticulous cook. Her kitchen shelf is lined with books on Italian gastronomy which expound on the science and art of the craft, and she seems to have just the perfect tool for every task. The ragu recipe she recently sent me is 8 pages long, replete with explanations, just to illustrate the pride she takes in cooking. But as with many experienced home cooks I’ve had the pleasure of joining in their kitchens, she works with remarkable ease and simplicity. Nothing too fussy, and everything relying upon instinct.

We began with the potatoes. Most cooks would advise you to use a floury potato, such as the Russet potato, but Elisa favours the waxier, red-skinned ones which cohere better when cooked and riced. Rather than boiling the potatoes in water, she steamed them in her Instant Pot. This marked another departure from the norm, but made a lot of sense. After all, the goal with gnocchi is to keep the moisture levels of the cooked potato as low as possible, so that you require less flour to bind it into a dough. Less flour = less gluten = more delicate texture.

While the potatoes were still warm, Elisa pressed them through her ricer. Ricing is preferable to mashing because it produces an even texture with no lumps, and you get a light, fluffy mound of potato as opposed to a gummy mass. At Etta, the cooks pushed the cooked potato through a metal sieve, which achieves a similar effect (I do this because I don’t own a ricer).

Once riced, the potato and flour were combined in a stand-mixer — this surprised me. I’d always heard the advice to work the dough as delicately as possible, but Elisa’s insouciance was proof that the amount and type of flour matters more.

The real brilliance of Elisa’s method lies in the shaping. Rather than fussing about with forming ropes of dough and nipping them into individual pillows, she rolled the mass out between pastry strips for an even thickness. The flat rectangle of dough was then cut into cubes, that we rolled into marbles between our floured palms. Finally, we pushed the dumplings along a gnocchi board to give them their characteristic ridged backs. For dusting, Elisa likes finely milled semolina flour for the way they prevent the dough from sticking more effectively than conventional wheat flour, though this is not strictly necessary.

We cooked the gnocchi in barely simmering water, and tossed them in Elisa’s homemade tomato sauce. In the Sorrentina tradition, we layered them with torn mozzarella (drained to remove excess moisture) and grated grana padano, then grilled them in the oven until the top was nice and bubbly.

Elisa initially worried that they may be too light — she is haunted by the leaden lumps that her nonna used to make, and always errs on the side of using less flour. Gnocchi are good only if they are light, but Elisa confessed that sometimes she puts so little flour in hers that she worries they may fall apart. But they were perfect — incredibly light, almost melting in the mouth.

It was clear that the lightest gnocchi involve straddling the line between not enough flour and just enough flour, and a certain residue of doubt in the cook’s mind. Sadly, because this type of gnocchi requires a bit of patience and is a lot more delicate to handle, Elisa says that it is not at all common in restaurants, where speed and efficiency are king.

Yesterday, I cooked the gnocchi for dinner so that I could go over everything before I forget, and to get the quantities down. Instead of doing a tomato sauce like Elisa did (the weather was too hot for that!), I chose to use the gnocchi in krapao. This is a fragrant stir-fry of mince, garlic, chillies with lashings of sweet soy and fish sauce, and a generous handful of basil (traditionally holy basil, which Italian basil is a great substitute for). As krapao is typically a meat dish, I added snow peas to balance the meal out. It turned out fabulous. The starch from the gnocchi actually helped to thicken the meat juices in the pan such that the rubbly mixture clung to it like a second skin.

With just two ingredients in the gnocchi — potatoes and flour — it’s really more about developing a sensitivity and feel for the dough rather than slavishly following a recipe. The lightest gnocchi — made with the smallest amount of flour you can get away with — are great in a tomato sauce, while slightly firmer gnocchi stand up to stir-fries. I might even add a touch of tapioca flour next time for a touch of springiness!

If you make a big batch of gnocchi, you can freeze any extras on a tray (spaced apart) while still raw, then transfer to a ziplock bag or container to keep in your freezer until ready to use. To cook, simmer in water until they float.

Krapao gnocchi
Feeds 2

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