PrintSnapshots from Asia: Ice Kacang
When the weather’s sweltering and you’ve got beads—no, rivulets—of perspiration trickling down your limbs and the sun dazzles so you could almost swear the air is shimmering, most people lose their appetite for "real food." They slurp ice pops, dive into bowls of ice cream, down milk shakes, attend fro-yo socials, stick their heads in refrigerators when the environmental police are not looking, and plot escapes to air-conditioned havens.
Here in Southeast Asia, where the weather’s like that, oh, pretty much all the time, and where women are commonly seen drawing lines through their food before digging in (dieters generally eat half a portion of what’s already half to a third of an average American serving), such calorie bombs are a no-no, but dessert still comes first ;)
Enter the ice kacang and its family of shaved ice-based desserts. Literally translated to "ice bean," you get a good serving of vegetables via the boiled, sweet, red adzuki beans; creamed corn; and cloudy, deliciously chewy attap chee, or palm seeds, that adorn this little mountain of ice. Green cubes of agar-agar (a firm, vegan jelly made from seaweed) and sometimes even jiggly black cubes of grass-jelly (made from an infusion of the Mesona chinensis, an herb in the mint family) provide a pleasing textural contrast to the crunch of the ice. This humble bowl of “horse food” is then drizzled with rainbow-hued sugar syrups, and a smidgin of evaporated milk, elevating it to something even avowed carnivores would hunker down contentedly over.
Photograph by Shimin Wong
About the author: Wan Yan Ling, Serious Eats's overseas summer intern, is an impoverished grad student and sourdough finger-crosser living in Singapore. She can usually be found in the kitchen procrastinating on "real work," or online tracking down obscure recipes. Ling thinks eating alone is no fun, and she still believes in hand-mixing.
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4 Comments:
The Filipino version of this is called halo-halo, which literally translates to "mix-mix". Halo-halo is sometimes topped with Ube ice cream, but pretty much has the same mix of beans and ice in it. Whatever you call it, it's definitely cool and refreshing on a hot day in Southeast Asia.
Marvin at 5:51PM on 07/19/07
Sigh. I haven't had one of those in......5 years or so. Although the cendol at Penang cafe' in West Covina is pretty darned good!
lysine at 6:31PM on 07/19/07
There was a song kids in Taipei used to sing about this type of dessert... I'll have to make this now to satisfy the nostalgia you've just inspired. Keep it coming, I am absolutely loving this wonderful column!
Cathy@noteatingoutinny at 10:44PM on 07/19/07
The ice cream "Cones," down on Bleecker Street in NYC, serves a corn ice cream that they claim is a traditional South American treat. That may be--all I can tell you is that it's astonishingly good! My friends were appalled that I would even order it (but I'm a sucker for anything labelled "the favorite flavor in [country name]"), but everyone loved it when they took their tentative tastes.
klg19 at 12:46PM on 07/20/07