San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The gospel of Malaysian laksa in the Bay Area
Tracy Goh sets the record straight on the noodle dish
On a dreary day dotted with drizzle in her window-filled apartment in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, Tracy Goh is preaching the gospel of Malaysian laksa. Goh not only makes a killer bowl of the spicy noodle soup, but she has served 1,030 bowls of laksa between November 2017 and October 2018 as part of her Laksa Project, a movement aimed to educate locals by feeding them.
Laksa is common in Southeast Asia, and typically includes noodles made from non-wheat starches like potato, tapioca or rice. But today’s sermon/ cooking session is on a dry asam laksa, and it feels a bit surreal, as Goh — an insatiably curious chef who’s outspoken and cheeky who I’ve gotten to know on Instagram — has suddenly come to life in front of me.
Online, her photos are evocative and artistic, highlighting Southeast Asian ingredients. On her Instagram, @eatwithtracy, you can watch a story on frequently asked laksa questions, a presentation that ends with visuals of how rempah (laksa paste) should look when it’s finished cooking (that moment when the oil separates and floats to the top of the sauce).
The 36-year-old Goh is an adventurous chef, and Instagram has provided her a way to share her experiments, whether she’s testing spiral curry puff dough or making otak-otak, a seasoned fish cake grilled in banana leaves. She’s outspoken, too — not afraid to call white people out on “Columbusing,” like when bunga telang, a blue flower used as a natural food dye in Malaysia, became trendy in unicorn drinks because it can change color to pink or purple. She’s willing to fight for people to use the correct terminology for her food (call her hand-laminated spiral curry puffs “empanadas” at your own peril). “It bothers me why everything from a foreign culture has to be named something else to be understood,” she says. “Stop being lazy, and learn the name.”
In the first five minutes of our cooking session, she’s already flipped everything I know about laksa on its head. The most well-known version, she says, is laksa lemak, also known as curry laksa. It’s made from coconut cream or milk, cooked with aromatics and served with chicken, shrimp, egg, tofu, vegetables and herbs. It’s the version you can find everywhere from Australia to Oakland, and the same one that Goh grew up eating at a hawker center in the SS2 neighborhood of Petaling Jaya, just outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. But Goh’s laksa today has tamarind instead of coconut milk, and is brothless.
And then she drops some history in her sermon: Historians believe laksa is the product of intermarriage between Chinese traders and women in port cities of Southeast Asia, mostly Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. The new wives decided to mash up the food their husbands loved (like noodle soups) with the Southeast Asian flavors they loved, like coconut milk and lemongrass. Laksa was born.
The dish was a bridge between two cultures, and a super adaptable recipe at that. This is something Goh stresses as she makes her own laksa: There’s no one way to make it. It’s a common hawker food, sold by street vendors, and everyone makes it differently. Malaysian cuisine, Goh says, was never codified the way French cuisine was. She thinks this happened because Malaysia was mostly an oral culture before Islam was introduced in the 14th century, which was when it adopted a modified form of Arabic script for the Malay written language. In other words, written records, let alone recipes, didn’t exist for a large part of Malaysian history.
Today, the descendants of Chinese immigrants are known as Peranakans, and Malaysia features three primary regional categories of laksa: laksa lemak (coconut milk-based; popular in Malacca), asam laksa (from the state of Penang, with a sour tamarind broth) and laksa kelantan (from the East Peninsular, gray-white broth from coconut milk and ground fish).
But hybrids pop up all the time, and it’s hard for even Malaysians to keep up. Goh didn’t know many of them until she moved to Australia for college and became interested in cooking. There, she researched; and then whenever she was home, she started tasting different laksas. In the city of Malacca, there was the laksa kahwin, which translates to marriage laksa; it’s a product of two Peranakan communities marrying (Penang and Malacca). “It has a mix of creamy coconut from laksa lemak and sour notes of asam laksa, although the ratio of the two differs from cook to cook,” she says.
Goh throws her asam laksa kering
together in a pan. Kering means dry, so it has more of a chunky, clingy sauce coating the chewy tapioca noodles. Instead of coconut, it has the sour, pungent amalgam of tamarind, mackerel and spicy chile peppers. The garnishes serve as a contrast to the fishy flavor of the noodles: pineapple for sweetness, mint and cucumber for cooling, onion and lime for acidity.
A few bites is all it takes to convert me to the laksa gospel.
Goh, who immigrated to San Francisco in 2012, actually did get her start on Instagram. She studied marketing and worked in social media, but after posting photos of her food, followers started asking her to host pop-ups. She did her first in 2012 out of her onebedroom apartment. She now cooks full time for private clients and at her pop-ups (where she often collaborates with other talented immigrant women chefs, like Siska Marcus and Vijitha Shyam; see events on www.eatwithtracy.com).
Her goal is to become the voice of Malaysian cuisine in the Bay Area.
“By voice, I mean taking the time to educate the public rather than just running Malaysian food establishments for profit. I want to start a laksa fever here,” she says. She’s looking to open a restaurant in San Francisco featuring regional Malaysian laksa, to be called Damansara. It’s named after the suburb of Petaling Jaya where her family lived in for the first 12 years of her life.
She ends our meal with a dessert called pulut tekan, glutinous rice steamed in coconut milk and colored naturally with bunga telang (blue pea flower), then pressed into cakes and served with kaya, a coconut milk jam. It’s decadent, starchy, creamy goodness, and fortifies me perfectly against the drizzle awaiting me outdoors, which, while needed, is still quite dreary.