Name: Laksa lemak
Yield: Serves four
Cuisine: Malaysian
Ingredients: 2 cups coconut milk; 1 quantity laksa paste or 4 tbsp bought paste; 300 g (10 oz) fresh round rice noodles or 200 g (7 oz) Hokkien noodles and 100 g (3 oz) rice vermicelli; 1 tsp salt; 8 fish balls; fresh mint and coriander sprigs, for garnish; 1 cup bean sprouts, blanched; 1 cucumber, peeled, seeded and cut into matchsticks; 2 tbsp bamboo shoots, rinsed and cut into matchsticks; 4 squares fried bean curd puffs, cut in half diagonally; 8 raw prawns, peeled; 1.5 litres (2½ pts) chicken stock; 2 tsp palm or brown sugar; meat from half a cooked chicken, sliced; 2 tbsp vegetable oil

Preparation info

Serves
four

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Noodle

By Terry Durack

Published 2002

About

This is my number one, very favourite noodle dish in all the world. It has every taste sensation you can think of – tart, salty, sour, sweet, rich, tangy, creamy – and a few others they haven’t invented words for yet. While you can buy some perfectly good prepared laksa pastes these days, you never get the same feeling of having really earned your laksa as when you pound the paste yourself.