Being a dutiful blogger and blog reader when I changed home town I started searching around for Kuala Lumpur based blogs. In my travels through cyberspace I found a few mentions of a hawker stall in Bangsar called Peter's Pork Mee which was meant to be not too far from where I lived. With noodle soup being my favourite food and pork my favourite meat how could I resist? It turned out to not be as simple a task as initially thought though.
First attempt our landlord offered to give us a lift and then convinced us on the way to go for a banana leaf curry with him instead. Second attempt we simply failed to find it. Third attempt we found the food court but this was evening and the food court is only open during the day. Fourth attempt the food court was open, every stall bar Peter's Pork Mee that is. His eggs had been delivered but they sat stacked on an otherwise empty stall. Fifth time I made it, although by that point the gf had left for Cambodia, to give me a week of uninterrupted study before my exam, and so I had to eat alone.
The stall was seriously popular, whilst other hawkers were leisurely filling a couple of bowls of laksa, or chopping some char sui to serve with rice, PPM was having to serve maybe ten bowls at a time. Whilst waiting I got chatting to an Indian man and he said he'd been coming to the food court for 20 years and they'd been turning out famous pork mee the whole time. How could something made every day for at least 20 years, all efforts focused on the same dish, not be fantastic?
With pork mee you get a rich, meaty stock, frequently flavoured with fried garlic, where you can really taste the golden clove come through, not at the bitter stage but not far from it. Meat can be simply pork mince, boiled quickly in the stock, or you can have the whole gamut of porcine delights - mince, lean, liver, intestines and stomach. An egg is frequently added, broke at the last minute into the bowl of mee, all cooking purely from the heat of the stock in the bowl. You can stir it through when you get it or carefully eat around it, saving it till the end by which point it will be very softly poached. I chose to leave it a minute or two before breaking it up into soft but quite large pieces. Prior to this trip I thought raw eggs were the reserve of carbonara or steak tartare but they frequently pop up in Chinese noodle dishes too where the residual heat is called upon for cooking, much like in the aforementioned Italian classic. PPM also added small cubes of deep fried pork fat, not scratchings, just crisp but unctuous centred cubes adding richness and texture. It really was a special dish and well worthy of the fame. When I get around to cooking again pork me will be one of the first dishes I blog. In the mean time I recommend breaking a raw egg into your noodle soup and letting the hot stock do its thing.
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