Familiar flavours from Malaysia

Machan’s Malaysian food festival has many dishes that are similar to Indian food

Vidya Deshpande

FOOD from South East Asia always holds appeal and attraction for Indians, being similar to the palate. Machan, the Taj Mahal Hotel’s popular coffee shop in Delhi, is holding a two-week Malaysian food festival, which started on April 12.

The Machan’s chef, Wilson Perry, had a month-long training in Malaysia to learn to make all the delicacies of the land. Malaysian food is a confluence of Malay, Chinese, Thai and Indian cuisine. There is a lot of use of coconut cream, lemon grass, galangal and Indian garm masalas.

I was invited to a pre-festival sampling. For starters, the chef had prepared mince lamb with lettuce and chilly oil salad. The mince had been cooked on a rapid fire and tossed with chilly oil and light spices to give it a tangy flavour. The other starter was a chicken satay, the popular street food in this region and traditional rice cakes with a spicy sauce. The rice cakes are bite-sized packed tightly with grated coconut.

The main course consisted of a mutton korma, which is very similar to Indian food. The chef tells me that this korma is made by the Muslim settlers from India. The chicken stew also had similarities with a typical Kerala coconut stew, only coconut cream was used instead of coconut milk and was flavoured with lemon grass and galangal, giving it a sweetish flavour with a tang of the spices.

This was served with roti canai, similar to the whorl-shaped Kerala parantha, and sea food stir fried rice and meehoon goreng (rice noodles). Of course, this was just a sampling. The lunch and dinner buffet will have other specialties too like dim sums, fried bananas, a variety of satays, hot chilli prawns, etc.
The taste of the food being familiar to the palate makes the meal enjoyable. The buffet is priced at Rs 450 excluding taxes.