South East Asian Street Food at Its Best! | Otak Otak

It's one of those dishes that you'll see grilled on the side streets of Malaysia and Singapore and it's a sort of fish paste. It's all really sort of well spiced and it's wrapped in banana leaf and then grilled to finish. It comes out almost like a steamed fish cake. Absolutely delicious, loads of flavour. Can't wait to show you guys. Hey guys, this week's Wok Wednesday is a suggestion from one of our awesome subscribers Smiley or Smiley. I'm Smiley, you're Smiley, we're Smiley, we smile together. Right, but thank you for your suggestion. We are doing Otak Otak which is a Malaysian grilled banana leaf sort of fish cake. Now with the number of ingredients here it could get a little bit confusing because there's a lot of pastes and there's another paste and there's a fish paste and there's a belacan which is a shrimp paste. So many different pastes. Let's start with the first paste which is the essentially curry paste that I'm going to make. I'm going to start with loads of chillies and dry chillies and more chillies. Get the gist. So I'm going to go for sort of half or a good handful of these dry red chillies. They've been soaked in hot water for about 15 to 20 minutes. We're going to add more chilli to this and this is just large red chillies. Some galangal. Galangal can be quite hard so just go careful with it. I'm using sort of half a thumb size of galangal. It has a very citrusy flavour to it. Along with those we're staying on the chilli theme here. Depending on how hot you like things. Some bird eye chillies. I'm just going to go for one of these. Now we've got some lemongrass to go along and complement that galangal. So you want to give it a good bash and then finely chop that up. You ask me why I'm doing this before putting all this into the blender. I mean I want the blender to help me get it to a slightly smoother sort of paste form but I will then pestle and mortar it thereafter again because I want it to be a really nice smooth mix. I've got about six lime leaves here. I'm just going to take them off the stalk and then finely chop those and then again straighten the blitzer. To work with all of that which is all very spicy but it's got the sweetness of the lemongrass and the sort of citrus sweet from the galangal is these things here which are candle nuts. Very similar in texture to macadamia nuts. And then core Malaysian ingredient is your belacan. Dried shrimp paste. I'm going to go for a good sort of two teaspoons of your shrimp paste. That there makes up pretty much my chilli paste. So I'm going to blitz those first and then I'll pound them in a pestle and mortar. I got a hit of chilli and I was trying to hold my breath and it's still gone through. That is a lot of chilli in there. So this is a type of thing that you could easily make a whole load of like this and then use as much as you wish to put into the paste and save the rest in little sort of cubes, ice cubes and freeze them. So once you've got your blitzed up ingredients, that lethal chilli paste, I quite like to then give it a good bash through the pestle and mortar to get it even smoother. And I could add oil to that chilli paste but I'm going to be adding oil to my fish mix later on. So my paste is a little bit smoother now. It's still got a little bit of coarse sort of texture to it but it's definitely more sort of combined. I'm happy with that. I don't mind if this is still sort of got bits of paste in there, my chilli paste in there because I'm going to add everything and everything's all going to combine together in the end anyway. I've got some prawns that I'm going to pop straight into the blitzer and then I've got some mackerel here which I'm just going to de-skin and just mackerel fillets and then chop that up into rough chunks and that can go along with the prawns. So I've got a couple of eggs which I'm going to crack into here as well and I've got some coconut milk. This is to make that sort of almost like quite quite soft paste and it's quite almost moussey in texture. Some turmeric, about a teaspoon of turmeric will do and the same amount of coriander powder. Good, sort of half a teaspoon of salt and then about half a tablespoon of sugar. Now we're going to blitz this mix up, that's the fish mix. I've also got some white fish fillet here and you can use cod or hake, haddock, anything like that will do. Nice little chunks of fish. I'm going to add those fish chunks into my mousse and then we'll just give that a good stir through and those chunks will kind of sit into that coconut fish mousse. For your sambal you want a good amount of oil, a couple of tablespoons of oil and start frying that paste. With all those chillies in there it will really start to deepen and you'll get more of a maroon colour. So my advice is just keep moving it around and allow it to sort of fry off quite uniformly and you'll smell that belacan, that shrimp paste cooking off. Once your chilli paste is starting to separate out then you want to take that. I'm going to mix that in and this will sort of change the colour and make it a little bit more deep orange in colour. Now this is the sort of thing that if you can't find banana leaves you could just deep fry it in sort of chunks and make fish cakes out of just as is but we're going to go the traditional way and we're going to wrap this in my banana leaf here. I've got my spicy fish mix here which I'm just going to lay into my banana leaf and then to close that up I've got a skewer and you want to skewer it on both sides. You should be able to get a couple on these small skewers here, a couple of wraps onto each pair of skewers and from here it's pretty simple stuff it's just a little bit of oil over your griddle or barbecue however you want to cook them really. It's fish so it cooks relatively quickly but you're probably looking about four or five minutes on either side and give it a turn. So it's not necessarily the done thing or the traditional thing but I quite like to pour a little bit of oil in here to stop the banana leaf from burning too much but also to then steam that fish mix through and cook it through much quicker. I can feel that the the otak otak, the fish mousse or mix inside is cooking through nicely here. Look at that, that looks so appetizing just from looking at that sort of charred leaf. If you're gonna use the water I would say that sort of if you're pressing into it and it's sort of bouncing back at you it'll probably only need a couple of minutes on the other side and it'll be done. Both those leaves are done you can see the mousse sort of peeking out there and it should sort of as I say bounce back a bit sort of spongy in texture. It's a very very simple way of serving things, you don't want to over complicate a street food dish like this. My homemade otak otak bringing me back to the streets of Malaysia. Now I'll break this up and show you guys sort of that texture inside and it's great to have that sort of different sort of flakes of fish that are wrapped into that sort of mousse or paste that you've made. Oh wow, the chilli is hitting me. That is really really full of flavour and as much as I wasn't the biggest fan of otak otak when I was a kid, now that my taste buds and palate is completely different that is amazing. I can see why Malaysian aunties, uncles, whoever they may be, love this as a snack. Fantastic. It'd be so good as just a fish cake as well but it's got the flavour of that banana leaf and the sweetness of the banana leaf as well. If you want spice, you like spice and you really want to sort of pack a punch of flavour into your food like this, don't forget to like, comment, subscribe, ding, hit that spicy notification bell and you won't regret it.