The 𝙤𝙩𝙖𝙠-𝙤𝙩𝙖𝙠

In the last few days, my wife and I had been talking about cooking otak-otak again. you know, that one quintessential dish that defines Nyonya cuisine in Penang. We don't cook it often but it's one that my family always enjoy. The fragrance and taste of the rempah is second to none, in my opinion. Out of this world. 

Except, it takes a lot of effort to prepare the rempah. I was roughly timing myself as I prepared it this morning and it took me close to two hours! I can just imagine how much time it had taken my aunt to grind the spices with the batu geling in the past. Me, I just use the blender. It's so much easier and faster but people tells me that it doesn't give the same oomph as rempah that had undergone the batu geling treatment.

You'd need banana leaf to line the base of your plate but unfortunately this morning, I had been unable to find anyone selling the leaves at the wet market. So I had to make do without the banana leaf. Luckily, there were lots of daun kadok in the house and we used these leaves to line our steaming plates. We only lined the bottom but we could have lined the top too. This, I told my wife not to do as I really liked to see the glorious yellow-orange of the otak-otak when steamed. 

So what went into the rempah? It's not a trade secret as anyone can always find various otak-otak recipes on the Internet. We still improvised with the portions according to our mood but basically, the ingredients were beaten raw eggs, dried red chilies, serai (lemongrass), shallots, garlic, lengkuas (galangal), kunyit (turmeric), toasted belacan (shrimp paste), buah keras (candlenuts), ginger and grounded peppercorn. For the proportions, just check with the Internet recipes. It is important that the lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, candlenuts and ginger, being fibrous and harder, should be sliced thinly before they go into the blender or you'd be stressing the blades. 

One other thing that I should say. Before the otak-otak is placed in the steamer, it is imperative that the water should be boiling. We found that the steaming itself should be timed at 11 or 12 minutes. Once, we accidentally over-steamed at more than 15 minutes - don't ask why - and the end result was an almost unpalatable otak-otak. The beaten eggs in the mixture had caused it to harden. So now, we know better!