Asian Salad Recipes - Malaysian Bean Sprouts with Spicy Prawn Salad (Kerabu Tougeh) Recipe

Ingredients

• 225g/8oz beansprouts

• 1 large red onion, quartered and thinly sliced

• 60g/2oz hard white coconut

• 30g/1oz dried shrimp

• 1 tbsp vegetable oil

• 1 tsp shrimp paste

• 2-3 small red chilies, finely chopped

• 150g/5oz raw prawns, peeled and deveined

• 1 lime

Serves 4

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Method

1. Tail the beansprouts and place in a salad bowl with the onion.

2. Crack open the coconut. Take a piece and pull away the shell. You will be left with solid white coconut about 1 cm (1/2in) thick. Very thinly slice the coconut, first into little squares and then again until you have tiny pieces the size of rice grains.

3. Dry-fry the coconut grains until golden brown and crisp. Add to the salad bowl. In a mortar, pound the dried shrimp to a coarse powder and add to the salad bowl. Mix the salad ingredients well and set aside.

4. Heat the oil in a wok or frying pan and stir-fry the shrimp paste until it breaks up in the oil.

5. Add the chilies and prawns and stir-fry for roughly 2 minutes, until the prawns are just cooked through. Remove from the heat.

6. Turn out on to the salad, squeeze in the juice of the lime, stir well and serve.

Note: Nonya, the cuisine that resulted from the intermarriage of later Chinese immigrants with local women in Malaysia and Indonesia, combines the speed and freshness of Chinese cooking with the richer spices of Southeast Asia. As the Nonya themselves become increasingly integrated into the host society, so their food becomes rarer, though it can still be found in surviving communities on the islands of Penang and Singapore and is well worth searching out for its unique range of tastes.

For this dish you need a mature coconut with a hard brown shell and solid white coconut flesh inside - not the young green coconut with soft milky flesh most commonly found in Asia. As the hard brown variety is usually all one can find in the West, for once overseas cooks have an advantage over the locals. You will probably have to buy a whole coconut, even though only a small amount is required for this recipe. The rest could be used for cakes or eaten on its own as a nut.