Nangka Burger at The PC Studio Cafe

 By Lee Yu Kit

Jan 2022

PC Studio Café is located in Damansara Intan, a high-rise incongruity in a commercial enclave shoehorned into PJ’s otherwise residential Section 17/19 and SS2 areas.  

In spite of its ground floor frontage and a few reserved parking lots, the anonymously named PC Studio Café doesn’t impress on first entry, into a plain jane interior with wooden tables laid out in orderly rows and a serving counter at the far end. Café, convenient canteen, or restaurant? 

A Harvested Burger

By Lee Yu Kit, Nov 2, 2021, 

Updated, Nov 9, 2021

With the surge in interest in realistic plant-based meat alternatives, food giant Nestle has launched its own line under the Harvest Gourmet brand. Like the poster boys of the alternative meat movement, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, Harvest Gourmet (HG) is all plant-based, with a range of products launched in Malaysia earlier this year. 

The products are made-in-Malaysia in a Nestle plant (See here ) and are available in local supermarkets. If you experienced sticker shock shopping for plant-based meats, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how reasonably priced Nestle’s offerings are.

Back Lane Banh Mi in Kota Damansara

 By Lee Yu Kit, 

Sept 21, 2021

Update: This banh mi outlet closed sometime in 2022. There were plans to revive it but it remains closed as of July 2023.

One of Vietnam’s popular street food dishes is banh mi, sandwiches made with Vietnamese baguette and a variety of fillings.  Quintessentially Vietnamese, banh mi is true fusion food born of France’s long occupation of Vietnam. French baguette is longer with a stronger texture than the smaller, airer Vietnamese version, for example.

Now from a backlane in Kota Damansara, there’s authentic Vietnamese banh mi, served from a literal hole-in-the-wall. The shop is painted a mustard yellow with green highlights, calling to mind a field of sunflowers, with the words “Banh Mi” painted on the wall.

KFC's ZERO Chicken Burger is a ?

 

Tasting KFC’s first meatless burger available in Malaysia

By Lee Yu Kit

The last time I stepped into a KFC was in 2019, in the town of Maran, en route to Kuantan. I was on a cycling trip with the longest, hottest section still ahead on the open road. It was after lunch time on a swooningly hot day. Most of the restaurants and coffee shops had closed, but there was an air-conditioned KFC open.

What I remember about that meal was that it had rice and fried chicken. The air-conditioning was blessedly cool within the restaurant.  We blinked in the bright sunshine after the meal, smiled bravely for selfies, mounted our saddles and started out on in the sultry heat on the second leg of our journey to Kuantan.

I didn’t step into another KFC until Feb 9, 2021, in rather altered circumstances. The Covid19 pandemic had affected the world in unprecedented ways. For the time being, dine-ins were disallowed. The KFC counter was strangely quiet.   It was the first day of KFC’s introduction of its Zero-Chicken Burger in Malaysia, said burger being its first meatless burger sold the country, following an apparently unstoppable trend sweeping the food world in plant-based meat alternatives. The Zero Chicken Burger has been available in Singapore before this.  

The Zero Chicken burger uses a meat-substitute patty said to be “high in protein, high in fibre, low in saturated fat, and contains no cholesterol’. It’s made by a company called Quorn, which has been producing a meat substitute from the 1960s, well before the darlings of the meat alternatives, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, made their debut.

Quorn has been available in supermarkets for decades, producing a range of meat-free alternatives: sausages, nuggets, meat pies, burgers, fish, among others, using mycoprotein, derived from fungi fermented in large vats. The result is a highly versatile, high-protein paste.

I’d bought and cooked Quorn sausages before. You can read of my impressions here: http://yukits.blogspot.com/2020/08/meat-free-quorn-vegetarian-sausages.html

The burger was presented in a snappy, attractive, green and white banded carboard box.

Within the box, the burger (RM12.99, RM15.99 in a Combo with fries and drinks) fit into the palm of the hand, smaller than I expected.  It didn’t look anywhere as luscious as the pictures, but that’s not unexpected; there’s advertising and there’s reality. 

A single fried patty with shredded lettuce was sandwiched between the two halves of the rather deflated looking bun. Brown barbeque sauce leaked from the burger onto the Colonel Sanders-decorated paper bag it was wrapped in.

The patty itself looked dry, so first impressions weren’t very inviting.  Biting in, the main thing I tasted was the barbeque sauce, piquant and strong-tasting, which pretty much set the tone for the overall burger experience. The bun didn’t belie appearances; it had no discernable character, no bite, no spine, little texture – it was, in other words, blank space, a filling meant to complete the idea that this was a burger, which necessarily includes a bread patty.

The meat alternative patty didn’t make an impression either, with a homogenous, somewhat pastier texture than I expected, with any flavour it possessed being drowned out by the brown barbeque sauce. The lettuce? Wilted looking. I scarfed down the rest of the burger without any sense of anticipation. It was a stomach filler, but nothing more.

Although the meatless chicken burger idea is laudable in coaxing meat eaters away from consuming meat (and the disproportionate resources it consumes compared to plant-based meat, as well as no chicken being sacrificed), the Zero Chicken Burger doesn’t present a strong case for switching over. It’s well-conceived and well-packaged, but the final product is hardly inspiring. It’s disappointing for what it could have been, but is not.

To console myself, I toasted a couple of slices of sourdough bread, spread them over with fresh avocado, fresh red onion, sprinkled with a little pepper. Fragrant, warm and inviting. Now that’s my idea of a sandwich.

 

Eating Our Planet

An opinion piece on eating.

September, 2019:  At the time of writing, the Amazon Rainforest is burning.  There are some 80,000 fires that have been raging for a month, with smoke plumes visible from space.  The number of fires is up by 80% compared to last year, according to a report by CNET. Brazil has declared an emergency.  The Amazon rainforest has been likened to the lungs of the planet, supplying 20% of the world’s oxygen supply, with 10% of its biodiversity. 

It’s an oxymoron that a rainforest can burn, but we’ve seen this before, because it occurs with unfailing regularity in our part of the world, with haze cloaking the skies and governments declaring emergencies and closing schools as forests and peatlands in parts of Indonesia and Malaysia ignite and burn during the dry season.  These are some of the lushest, wettest, most biologically rich forests in the world.

How can they burn?

The fires are set by humans, and they spin out of control, destroying ecosystems and throwing millions of tons of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) into the atmosphere, while damaging the capacity of the land to absorb more CO2.    We burn forests because it is the fastest way to clear more land for agriculture and food production for a human population of 7 billion. We, humans, are altering our planetary ecosystem at the most dramatic rate in its history.

In August 2019, the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released a document entitled “Land is a Critical Resource”.  It notes that the way humans use land has a marked effect on climate change. Land use contributes 23% of human greenhouse gas emissions, the report notes, adding that “some dietary choices require more land and water and cause more emissions of heat-trapping gases than others.”  Indeed.

In other words, what and how we eat affects climate change.

Making Tempeh Burgers

You know tempeh – it’s that tasteless white pap that’s sometimes fried with ikan bilis and chili and eaten with rice. I’ve never been fond of tempeh, in spite of the fact that it’s nothing more than fermented soy beans, and supposed to be protein-rich and good for you in the same way that a juicy steak is bad for you.