Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Food In Singapore 15: Satay Bee Hoon

In this blog post I will be talking about a very interesting dish of Singapore cuisine, Satay Bee Hoon.

Satay Bee Hoon; why the long name?
Satay Bee Hoon probably reminds you of 2 separate dishes: the Malay Satay and the Chinese Bee Hoon. This already tells you about this unique cultural fusion dish. Satay Bee Hoon is a dish whereby a special type of peanut sauce is spreaded over vermicelli and other ingredients. The peanut sauce taste and looks very similar to the one served with satay, and thus bringing about the name.



Ingredients of the Satay Bee Hoon
The main ingredient of the dish is obviously the peanut sauce, which contributes to most of the taste of the dish. Other ingredients include sliced cuttlefish, kang kong (a type of vegetable), beansprouts, slices of pork, prawns and cockles. These ingredients are cooked separated and after cooking, they are placed together with the vermicelli before peanut sauce is spreaded over them.



Personal Opinion
In my opinion, I feel that satay bee hoon is a very difficult dish to prepare, because there are so many ingredients, and they must be cooked separately (e.g. how can prawns and cockles be cooked together?). However, I feel that making this dish taste nice is not very difficult. Even if the other ingredients taste mediocre, as long as the peanut sauce taste awesome, the taste of the peanut sauce will be able to overpower the taste of the other ingredients and make the entire dish taste good.

Personally, I don’t really care if the peanut sauce tastes nice. This is because all of the peanut sauce seems to taste the same. What matters to me is the amount of sauce given. As locals would put it, if the sauce given is too little, then you won’t feel “Shoik!” enough when you eat the dish. Thus I feel that the amount of sauce given should not be cut down, as it will be the downfall of the entire dish.

Food for Thought

As I have mentioned, the peanut sauce contributes to most of the dish’s taste. Can you imagine what the dish will taste like without the satay sauce? What will the dish become? Will it still taste nice?

Apart from that, what is your favourite ingredient among the many ingredients of Satay Bee Hoon?

Credits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satay_bee_hoon
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