Before tonight, I had no idea what this hum chim beng stuff was. But I had heard that this was some kind of fry-up-your-stuff place, which sounded rather interesting. So I stopped by Maxwell Food Centre tonight (Stall 28), expecting something like Foo Kee with a wide selection of random stuff to deep fry. Instead, I found a very spartan setup with only some dough (in a sweet or salty option) and a wok with hot oil in it. Well, it was seven pieces for S$1 (US$0.70), so I gave it a shot.
I couldn't quite figure out the process here since some guy in front of me seemed to help himself to frying stuff in the wok, but eventually I got my share. Since I usually don't like sweet food (nor red bean paste), I only got one of the sweet variety just to give it a try. This was much better than I thought it would be, as it wasn't too annoyingly sweet (nor loaded with red bean paste). But it did have some sesame on it and a mildly warm temperature that kinda made it like a local version of Krispy Kreme. OK, that worked for me.
And how about the salty ones? They tasted like, well, fried dough. While I didn't think that this was anything to go nuts over, I didn't mind it either as the spices and grease did remind me a bit of Taiwanese fried chicken (especially since it came in a brown paper bag that allowed me to walk down the street and eat at the same time). Anyone wanna start selling these as movie theater nibbles or stadium concessions?
1 comment:
Not sure about now. Back in the days at the old Maxwell Food Centre, when it was 10 ham chin pengs for a dollar, business was so good that customers typically help to fry the ham chin pengs and bag them themselves to help speed up the process so that the owners (the old ah peh and his children) can concentrate on making them.
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