A Tiger in the Kitchen (11 page)

“What else are you going to put in?” he asked, wincing when I mentioned malt syrup and powder. “That’s going to give it a bitter taste!” he said, disappearing once again and returning with a little paper bag of brown sugar and very stern instructions to “use this instead.” Given that he makes and sells more than two hundred bagels a day using an old family recipe—and that he was now my high-gluten hero—I figured I should listen to him.

Back in my kitchen, I mixed yeast with high-gluten flour and let it sit for two hours to rise. Then I added salt, brown sugar, more instant yeast, and a few more cups of high-gluten flour and really stirred the mix up. This dough was nothing like anything I’d handled before—this was one stiff ball of ectoplasmic stickiness. I began to understand how victims in aliens movies felt. Then came the kneading—which was supposed to last for ten minutes in order to pass the “windowpane test,” in which the dough is so elastic that you can stretch it out to form a semi-sheer “window.”

I kneaded. And kneaded. And kneaded. My hands, my arms, my elbows hurt. There was sweat on my brow. I began to think that, even though Michelle Obama has said, “You know, cooking isn’t one of my huge things,” she might change her mind if she realized how much it could help keep those toned arms of hers in shape. Who needs a gym when you can bake bagels?

After thirty minutes of pressing and pummeling, when the dough felt plenty stretchy even without any windowpaning, I made the executive decision to listen to my aching arms and stop. I rolled up the dough into ten little balls, guesstimating that each one was the 4.5 ounces it was supposed to be. After covering them with a damp towel and letting them rest for twenty minutes, I formed them into bagels by poking holes in the centers and stretching out those holes. Then they sat for twenty minutes at room temperature before going into the fridge to “rest” overnight.

During that time, I made an important discovery. When it comes to baking, guesstimation would be a don’t.

Comparing notes with Nicole, the San Diego baker who had started it all, and other Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge bakers on Twitter, I realized that I was supposed to have twelve bagels, not ten. My bagels looked enormous, but it was too late—my bagels had been made. And I had to sleep in them. (Or something like that.) Besides, Mike, a great lover of all breads, had been growing more excited by the hour about homemade bagels for brunch. The next morning, even before his eyes were open, he mumbled, “Don’t you have bagels to be making?”

And so the boiling began. I put them in boiling water for five minutes on each side, and then they were ready for coating. After kicking myself for throwing out the last of the Japanese crushed seaweed, sesame seed, and sea salt mix that I sometimes use on rice, I tossed together some minced garlic, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds. And finally, after two days and two sore arms, the bagels went into the oven. I was edgy with anticipation. (And Mike was edgy with an ever-growing hunger.)

The end result was lovely. I’d never eaten a bagel fresh out of the oven before. The middles were soft and chewy, and they had a lightly sweet taste that made them better than versions I’d bought in stores. When I’d decided to make bagels, even I had questioned the silliness of it. I rarely eat bagels myself—and what would be the point of learning to make something that I probably would never make again?

Watching Mike attack my bagel, however, I began to understand. And when he asked for seconds and then contemplated thirds, the purpose of this endeavor—and of this modern wifery in the kitchen at all—started to dawn on me. In fact, I started to wonder what I had been waiting for all these years.

The next time I return from Bergdorf Goodman with another “sorry honey I just couldn’t resist them” pair of Christian Louboutins, I’m making bagels.

CHAPTER SIX

While I didn’t have any “aunties” in New York to guide me on the Singapore culinary front, I had recently acquired an “uncle.” (Albeit one who shrieked
“Aiyah!”
and squawked quite a bit at the idea of me actually calling him that.)

In Manhattan’s West Village, there’s a small nook of a restaurant that I race to whenever my stomach gets homesick: Café Asean. The tofu bakar on the menu is a dead ringer for the
tauhu goreng
—a Malay dish of crispy, deep-fried tofu split open and stuffed with julienned carrots and bean sprouts and drowned in a sweet peanut sauce—that I grew up eating. And the
mee goreng,
a spicy Malay fried noodle tossed with shrimp, scrambled egg, and crispy tofu bits, never fails to make me think of my late-night suppers with Dad. After years of eating my way through the Café Asean menu, a friend introduced me to the chef, Simpson Wong, a native of Malaysia whom I instantly admired. He is fearless with food and unafraid to cook, touch, chop, and eat anything. Spleen sandwiches, pigs’ organs—you name it, he’s devoured it. In the few years that we’ve known each other, Simpson has very patiently tried to teach me some things about making the dishes of our motherlands. Soon after I got to know him, we began to get together every few weeks to cook—usually in his modern, spacious home kitchen, which opens out into a large, airy living room. (My own Brooklyn Heights kitchen, alas, is the size of a closet. I have a New York friend with a purse closet that’s about the size of my kitchen.) Helping Simpson put together meals for our friends, I’ve learned a few things about Southeast Asian cooking.

Catching a glimpse of stacks of sardine cans during a recent trip to Chinatown, Simpson was suddenly transported to his days as a child growing up in the small logging town of Tanjung Malim, Malaysia, where his family was so poor that sardine sandwiches were a treat. I’d grimaced slightly when I walked into Simpson’s apartment, ready to help him in the kitchen, and he mentioned the word
sardines.
I’d never liked sardine sandwiches myself, even though they were popular in my primary school tuckshop. They were too fishy, my breath would stink for hours afterward, and I loathed the fact that bone fragments were a more than occasional feature. But Simpson, who’s always experimenting with Malaysian and Singaporean dishes that he might introduce in his restaurant, was making a finger-food version that he hoped would appeal to New Yorkers.

The Singaporean recipe for the mashed sardine filling calls for minced red onion, lime juice, ketchup, and some chili sauce. Simpson had thought about this and come up with a strategy for the fishiness that I’ve been wrinkling my nose at for years. “It’s simple,” he said. “You just put some Asian sesame oil to cut the flavor lor!” He took out a bottle and generously drizzled the sardine mixture with the sweet, honey-hued oil. He was right. With the sardine mix mashed, along with slender slivers of onion, cucumber, and tomato between slices of toasted bread, the sandwich was heavenly. If only the sandwich uncle in my primary school had experimented a little more.

One day, I told Simpson that I missed
popiah.
The Singaporean-Chinese version of the summer roll came filled with a mélange of ingredients like minced shrimp and jicama. Ah-Ma had made fantastic
popiah,
but it had been years since she’d done it, so I hadn’t had a homemade version in ages. Once I mentioned this, of course, Simpson was on a mission. A few days later, we found ourselves in Chinatown, feeling up jicama and poking at carrots before racing off to his kitchen with our loot of ingredients.

Cooking with Simpson isn’t easy. For starters, I am the sous chef. Not only that—I am the sous chef to a man who’s used to bossing around
professional
sous chefs. Combine that with my limited knife skills and general anxiety around peelers—which, hello, can easily take the polish off your well-manicured nails—and you have an almost surefire friendship breaker. (In my own kitchen, Mike is the designated sous chef. I find that if I keep myself very busy taking a nap while the ingredients get prepped, more love gets put into the food, the end product is better. Forget kissing the cook. Sous chefing for the cook—now
that’s
pure love.) In Simpson’s kitchen, however, no naps are allowed. He desperately wants me to learn—and he believes the only way to learn, of course, is by actually chopping and peeling. Quaint idea, that.

And so I found myself at his kitchen counter, sipping a flute of Veuve as I peeled and chopped jicama as best I could to the repetitive chorus of a rather disdainful teacher. “Aiyoh! Why you chop so big?” Simpson would say, grabbing the knife and showing me how to slice the jicama into straw-thin slices. As hard as I tried, however, my fingers once again didn’t cooperate. We ended up with a mountain of chunks that looked more like cigarettes. I shuffled the slices around, positioning the thinner ones on top, hoping he wouldn’t notice—mind, rather. But Simpson stared hard at the mound. “Ai
yoh
,” he said. I wondered where I could find an actual cigarette.

Sighing, he decided to carry on anyway. First, he drizzled some oil into a pan and started frying up the shrimp. Then shallots, then jicama.

Finally, he set out
popiah
wrappers on the counter, showing me how to assemble the rolls. First, he spread a leaf of lettuce on the wrapper so the wet ingredients don’t rip through the thin wrapper—then he piled on the stir-fried shrimp, jicama, and shallots. Finally, he drizzled Southeast Asian bottled sweet sauce and chili sauce on the edges of the ingredients and deftly rolled up everything. After slicing the
popiah
into three-quarter-inch bits, we dunked them into more sweet sauce before eating.

The rolls were delicious—a combination of crunchy, savory, and slightly sweet. As we chewed, I tried to think back to my grandmother’s
popiah.
But I couldn’t quite remember how they tasted. Were they better? Different? It had been so long I genuinely couldn’t tell. As I was thinking, Simpson watched me carefully. “It’s good,” I finally said. He rolled his eyes.

For months afterward, when anyone mentioned cooking with me, he’d immediately squawk: “I worked so hard to make
popiah
like your grandmother’s, and you said it was only okay—
cheh!
”

Getting my maternal grandmother to teach me her recipe for
popiah
a few months later in Singapore would prove to be difficult. Once again, she didn’t quite remember what went into it. And once again, Auntie Alice and I were left guessing. “Well, we definitely need
mang guang
[jicama], . . . right?” I said, adding the one piece of knowledge I remembered from my
popiah
-making episode with Simpson. “And shrimp?” Over e-mails and phone calls, we hashed out a rough ingredients list, and once again, I was in my grandmother’s kitchen.

This time, I brought a sous chef—Erlinda, my mother’s uncomplaining maid. Auntie Alice and I were instantly relieved she was there, because the bossy fussiness that Simpson had, my grandmother had in spades. And more. The kindly and sweet smelly puppy–crooning ah-ma I knew vanished the moment the peeling started. “Not like that!” “Thinner!” “Smaller!” “Where’s the dried shrimp?” Auntie Alice, my sister, and I trembled in a corner, watching the orders fly out of her mouth as Erlinda valiantly chopped on. (My mother, still avoiding the kitchen, had reluctantly joined us but very wisely decided to take a nap while all this went down.)

“Ah-Ma wants to teach you the best recipe so you know how to do it on your own in America,” Ah-Ma finally explained quietly. Coming from a woman who had cried bitterly when I first announced that I was going to college in America and then cried more each time I left Singapore for the United States in the following sixteen years, this was significant. She had never wanted me to be away from her. But now that I was, and now that I might have a family of my own there someday soon, she wanted me to listen up and learn.

Once the ingredients were fried up, the wrapping began. Before we knew it, we had a mound of
popiah
on the table. It was time to see how we’d fared.

The
popiah
was tasty—not better, not worse than Simpson’s. Watching my sister, my mother, my auntie Alice, and my grandmother gathered around the kitchen counter, wrapping
popiah,
I couldn’t remember the last time we had all spent an entire afternoon together. And with my active avoidance of anything culinary, when we had gotten together, cooking certainly had never happened.

Whether the rolls were delicious or as we remembered, of course, had been immaterial all along.

I hadn’t spent much time back in Singapore before another substitute uncle appeared in my life.

We had first met in New York, at a Singaporean cooking demonstration the year before. One night I’d entered a cavernous space near Manhattan’s trendy Meatpacking District, flustered, flushed from the cold, horrendously late because of work, and hungry for the spicy Singaporean food I could already smell in the air. The moment I got there, I was immediately instructed: “Try the
laksa
—it’s amazing.” Now,
laksa
—a dish of noodles with tofu and shrimp in a creamy, curried soup—isn’t my favorite Singaporean dish. I’d hardly eaten it as a child; it is so rich and thick that I find it impossible to swallow in ninety-degree weather. But a chilly October night in New York felt like the perfect time to be having some. And so I sauntered up to the
laksa
table and waited for a minute. The young server in a white cook’s uniform was off in some corner idly chitchatting. I waited, and waited, then I tapped the server on the shoulder, asking him with immense irritation if he could just please dish out a serving for me. “Of course,” he said, rushing over to scoop soup into a bowl for me swiftly and politely.