By Lee Yu Kit
Jan 2022
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Lee Yu Kit
Jan 6, 2021
Luncheon
meat was a staple of my early years. I ate enough of it to keep the local
distributor prosperous, if not tilt the trade balance with China. Luncheon meat
came in cans from China, although the original product is actually SPAM, by
Hormel Foods of the US. It was the right product at the right time, meeting a
need for an inexpensive source of meat during the Great Depression, and
becoming globally popular after WW2, thanks to its wide distribution wherever
US troops went.
Luncheon Meat is still hugely popular, although we now know that it’s a highly processed meat, high in saturated fats, carcinogenic preservatives and low in nutrients, and even protein. But it tastes good, being a mainstay of chap fan (economy rice) vendors and a cheap and tasty, if nastily unhealthy food.
Residents
of SS2, PJ will be familiar with Murni Discovery, the value-for-money eatery
that sees tables spilling onto sidewalks since 1999. Murni’s latest venture is
something else entirely: up the stairs above Murni is M’Laboori, a modern,
spacious nook with clean lines, books on wooden shelves, discreet overhead
lighting and air-conditioning. It’s a bookshop cum vegetarian restaurant-café.
By Lee Yu Kit
Quorn
meat-free products are now available in Malaysia. We take a look, cook and
taste the vegetarian sausages
Health concerns, the large environmental footprint of
producing meat, as well as animal welfare have all been given as reasons for
the upward trajectory in the consumption of plant-based meats, although, on a
global level, meat consumption overall is higher than ever, largely driven by
demand from developing countries.
Of the plant-based meats, UK-based Quorn has been around
since 1985. It is widely available in over a dozen countries, including,
recently, Malaysia.
Vegetable
protein: Mycoprotein
Unlike most meat substitutes, which use soy and pea
proteins, Quorn uses mycoprotein, which is derived and harvested from the
fermentation of a fungus. Nutritionally, mycoprotein is naturally high in
protein (11g per 100g) and fibre. It is low in saturated fats, carbohydrates,
sugar and salt. Additionally, it
contains calcium, potassium, phosphorus and small amounts of other minerals
such as zinc and selenium.
Notably, mycoprotein is a complete protein, containing all
the essential amino acids, which is unusual in plant proteins.
A 1992 study linked the consumption of mycoprotein with
lowered levels of LDL (“bad” cholesterol) and increased HDL cholesterol (“good”
cholesterol).
Quorn also points out that the production of mycoprotein
uses as much as 90% less land and water resources than in producing some animal
proteins.
Quorn products are available in a range of forms, including
sausages, nuggets, mince, burgers and fish fingers. You can check out their
range at https://www.quorn.co.uk/products/all.
For those concerned about intolerance or allergies to Quorn products, the company addresses this in their website, https://www.quorn.co.uk/intolerance
Cooking
Quorn Sausages
I picked up a bag of at Quorn sausages at Jaya Grocer in The
Starling. At RM31.20 for 12 sausages,
that’s quite a bit more than you’d expect to pay for commercial meat sausages.
The cooking instructions were simple: fry from frozen for
about 15 minutes in a little oil, which I dutifully followed. Appearance wise,
the sausages are short and stubby, and pale coloured when uncooked. The
sausages are not vegan, using rehydrated free-range egg albumin as a binder,
although vegan Quorn products are also available. Mycoprotein and albumin are
the two major ingredients, with others being vegetable oils, rusk, onion,
stabilisers, firming agents and flavouring.
In the pan, the sausages turned brown rather nicely as they
heated up, with the heated parts browning more than the less heated parts, as
with real sausages. They certainly
looked convincing. They smelled quite nice as well. Appearance wise, there was
nothing to suggest that these weren’t ordinary meat sausages. In the attached picture, the sausages are
acquiring a nice brown colour in a frying pan.
Isn’t
this a chicken sausage?
And how did they turn out? The look like regular sausages
and when cooked, have a firm texture, revealing a slightly-pinkish cross
section when cut. I had the sausages with fried onions, lettuce and tomato
slices on bread. The sausages had a good mouthfeel and gave a good sense of
satiety after eating. You can see how
the sausage looks when cooked, and served on bread with condiments in the attached
picture.
In the taste test, they are most similar to chicken
sausages, with the slight bounce and mild flavour of chicken sausages. It was a good lunch meal, sausages with bread
and vegetables.
It’s noteworthy that real chicken sausages can be expected
to contain amounts of growth hormone and antibiotics fed to chickens, as well
as some saturated fat. Sausages are usually made from the less commercially
desirable parts of the animal, ground up with the addition of flavouring,
colouring and preservatives, into a homogenous mince.
Although they contain no animal meat, Quorn sausages are,
nevertheless, a highly-processed food, made to look and taste like chicken
sausages. They’re not the best choice if you want to eat healthily – for that,
go with minimally processed, whole foods – but if you fancy chicken sausages
every now and then, and have reservations about eating animal meat, these would
do the trick.
