INDIAN ROJAK

15 April 2010

This is the second day of my walking regime.  From Suntec City, in office attire, I walked across the overhead bridge over Nicholl Highway to Beach Road.  Then down Middle Road to Waterloo Street.  Unlike my first walk which was rather random but ended with me eating a $16 ramen.  I had a secondary mission this time round.  Striding along Waterloo Street I finally arrived at Block 262 where Nan Tai Eating House is. And my favourite Indian Rojak stall.  It had taken me some 20 minutes to reach here. So a refuelling stop was called for.

“Rojak’ is a Malay word for mixture.  Indian rojak is just that – a mixture of mostly deep-fried food items like shrimp fritter, coconut fritter, tofu, fish cake, fermented soybean (“tempe”), potato, re-expanded dried cuttlefish, and many others.  You choose what you want and the seller deep fries them again and serves them garnished with slices of cucumber and onion and a spicy sweet potato sauce as a dip

I chose my favourite bits – the shrimp fritter, tempe, tofu and cuttlefish.  To me, the most important part of the Indian rojak are the shrimp fritter and the sauce as they define how good a particular rojak is.  The great thing about the shrimp fritter at this stall is that it is mostly shrimp with just enough flour to hold the shrimps together.  More often than not, the shrimp fritter you find at other outlets is mostly flour.  The crucial ingredient in the sauce is the pureed sweet potato unlike the watery peanut sauce you find elsewhere.

After recharging, I walked back through Bras Basah Road and passed the ‘Flirting Point’ at the Singapore Arts Museum (SAM).  No one was around to flirt with though. The whole loop took an hour, 20 minutes to walk to the rojak point, 20 minutes to eat and 20 minutes to walk back.  Can I sustain the regime? If I don’t succumb to stinky armpits first.