Hey Hive!
Now that a lot of people here have already gotten vaccinated, I'm very happy to hear that Singapore is now allowing in-house dining again but obviously you have to be vaccinated. But since there aren't any restrictions this allows us to try out different food places again!
So Sean and I had been watching this Youtuber named Zermatt Neo who is a pretty famous competitive eater here in Singapore! Most of his videos are challenge videos where he tries to eat a huge amount of the same dish, such as this one where he eats 34 bowls of minced pork noodles (aka bak chor mee):
But he also has a lot of videos where he goes to a restaurant or hawker centre/food court and spends $100 trying a bunch of different stalls' dishes at once, like this one where he goes to Chinatown Complex (a huge and famous hawker centre here) with another Youtuber - Ghib Ojisan!
Just watching him try all the different food makes us so hungry and made me crave hawker food so bad! So we got inspired to go and visit a hawker centre and order all our favourite food since it's been quite some time that we've had hawker fare.
So on Sean's day off, we did just that! We headed to the nearest-ish hawker centre which we've never been before to check out their stalls and get our craving satisfied. On Google, we found out that there was a place called Chong Pang Market & Food Centre that wasn't too far from our neighbourhood (and also quite famous) so we headed there!
At the time there were still some restrictions due to covid, but thankfully it wasn't too intrusive. We just had to check in at the entrance and that's about it. We took a walk around the market seeing what stalls there were and making mental notes of which ones we wanted to try.
It was a Friday afternoon when we went by so there were quite a few people around but it was a big market so there were plenty of seats available.
One craving I had was definitely for fried carrot cake (or radish cake to be more accurate). So we went in search of a carrot cake stall first to whet our appetite! Eventually we found this one which sells the typical stir fried dishes of Carrot Cake, Oyster Omelette, Fried Kway Teow and Hokkien Prawn Mee.
A lot of people might know carrot cake as a dessert but here in Singapore it is a delcious savoury snack also known as chai tow kueh. A dish of Teochew cuisine, it's basically stir-fried cubes of radish cake and egg looks like this:
Fun fact: there's actually no carrot at all in our version of carrot cake! The reason why it is called "carrot cake" is because of a loose English translation from the Hokkien name of "radish pastry", where chai tow can mean carrot or radish, and kueh or kway means cake.
Either way, it's really delicious and one of my all-time favourite hawker foods! Salty and savoury, the radish cubes are chewy, bouncy and moist and the egg is nicely fried and crispy on the edges. There's also a little bit of spice from the chili they added which complemented perfectly. It was soo yummy and really satisfied my craving, although I definitely wanted more.
I didn't take a picture of it but you could actually see tubs of radish cubes and many trays of eggs beside the stall so you know they prepared it fresh in advance.
We also decided to try their Hokkien Prawn Mee since there wasn't any other hokkien mee stalls open at the time. Hokkien Mee is a Fujian dish consisting of rice and egg noodles stir fried with prawns, squid and pork slices and is often served with a lime and chili on the side.
To be honest it didn't look too impressive but the chili did look quite promising compared to Hokkien Mee we've tried at other places. The noodles itself tasted pretty average, and the gravy was a little more fluid than I would've liked, but the chili was really good and had the right amount of spice that paired well with the savoury sauce and the zest of the lime.
Overall it was pretty alright, but I've had better at other hawker stalls so I don't think I would buy this again. The carrot cake was definitely a lot better for sure.
Another snack we got was Chwee Kueh, which is a steamed rice cake served with preserved radish. Sean was actually the one who introduced chwee kueh to me and it's pretty good as a hearty breakfast or teatime snack!
We actually discovered that our favourite chwee kueh stall had a branch right at this hawker centre! What a happy coincidence!
This is a famous Bedok Chwee Kueh stall that we used to patronise years ago when we lived in the East side of Singapore. I don't normally crave for chwee kueh but whenever I think of it I recall this very stall. So it was a true surprise and a nice throwback to find out they had a branch all the way here as well.
When we saw it we just had to try it again and see if it still held up. So we bought 3 pieces of chwee kueh to share.
The steamed rice cakes were served freshly warm and stacked with plenty of preserved radish with a side of chili sauce. And it was so tasty! The rice cakes were nice and moist with a soft but chewy texture, and went so well with the salty and slightly sour taste of the preserved radish. I think it was a tad too strong for me but it was still really tasty nonetheless. And the chili provided some spice too which is always good.
We did try more dishes from different stalls but I think I'll leave that for next week! Tune in next time for more delicious hawker food!
Thanks so much for reading!
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