| | Doug Chew Cooks AsiaDouglas Chew travels from Kukup, a tiny fishing village just a swim across the Straights of Malacca from Singapore, up the Malay Peninsular to Kota Bahru, a stroll from the Thai border. Along the way he visits Malacca, Kuala Lumpur, Kuantan, Ipoh and Penang, as well as some delightfully out of the way kampungs and villages that travelers rarely see, all the while cooking up some fascinating local dishes. Douglas Chew is an Malaysian Chinese and although he is better known in Paris and New York as a haut couture designer, he has a mastery of many various Asian cuisines born of a desperation for home-style cooking while studying in London. There are no fancy restaurants in this series. Douglas learned his cooking from his Nonya Grandmother and Chinese mother. What he cooks is genuine home-style Asian that anyone can cook be they in Sydney, Boston or Manchester. Malaysia is a great place to start this series. It is unique South East Asia in that it has a mix of cultures, Malay, Chinese and Indian and therefore a fantastic mix of Asian cuisines. Most travelers agree, here is the best Asian food in the world. The Malay cooking has influenced Chinese and the Indian has influenced both the others, giving Malaysian food the variety and depth it is famous for. Each program features Douglas exploring a town or village, encountering interesting and inevitably amusing locals and cooking two dishes unique to that location. In episode nine for example he explores the town of Ipoh, half way between Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Here he discovers Ipoh's Station Hotel, (one of themost charming and cheap in Malaysia) tastes the local delicacy, Ipoh Chicken, (not impressed: tastes like boiled chicken in soy sauce) tries the local whisky, (firewater) and cooks two local dishes; a spicy sambal dip and Malaysian style sweet and sour pork spareribs. Most of the cooking Douglas does in this series takes place in busy streets and lane ways, at the hawker stalls the region is famous for, leaving the audience in no doubt that this isn the real thing. The dishes cooked range from Malaysian style seafood, Malay rendangs, Indian curries and Nonya style pork and chicken, to Malaysian style Chinese.
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