Belacan at Peninsula Malaysian

OK, in my last post I blogged about how B and I like to be culinarily adventurous. Well, sometimes we get burned.

One of the neatest areas of this fine city is Eat Street, which is the nickname of a long stretch of Nicollet Avenue that has a ton of restaurants. The banners on the lamp posts proclaim that it is "17 blocks of eating adventure."

A couple weeks ago B and I went over to Eat Street and checked out Peninsula, which offers Malaysian cuisine. Here's Citypages's description of the place:

Are you missing your hot, tropical nights among the famous food hawker stands of Kuala Lumpur? Well pine no more, for Minneapolis now has Peninsula, a vast, spic-and-span new restaurant that offers an almost countless array of authentic Malaysian dishes, foods that, as you know, spring from that melting of Indian, Chinese, and Malay cuisines. Start your meal with that quintessential street food, satay, here available in beef, chicken, and tofu variations, and be sure to add an order of achat, a tangy, crisp vegetable salad cloaked with a silky peanut dressing. Consider trying the stickily delicious niblets called volcano pork ribs, as well as the remarkably simultaneously crisp and custardy "spicy & salted golden tofu." Hot pots, like the tofu curry one, are intensely flavored and unforgettable, and the chow fun noodles are silky as rain clouds. If you're really feeling in the mood for something ultra authentic, order the kan kun belacan--water spinach in a spicy fermented shrimp sauce that's as Malaysian as tuna hot dish is Minnesotan. The restaurant has friendly service, room for you and all your friends, a beer and wine list, and is open till from 11:00 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. most days, and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, making it perfect for those hot, not-so-tropical nights when you're stuck at your desk till way after all those other Eat Street restaurants close.

We'd never had Malaysian cuisine before. I got the beef rendang (slow-cooked chunks of beef, lemongrass, chili paste, coconut milk, cinnamon, cloves and red curry), and B got a seafood hot pot. Both were delicious. We also had a great appetizer called Roti Canai (kind of like a flaky Malaysian tortilla with a delicious dipping sauce). The only odd thing was that towards the end of the meal we noticed a horrible smell. B speculated that it was one woman's feet (she had taken her shoes off). It was raining that day, and I thought someone must've stepped in some particularly nasty mud or dung. But we soon forgot about it.

Then tonight we went back for dinner. I got the "Queen's Tofu," which was delicious. B had fried whole fish, Malaysian style.

And from it we realized what the smell from two weeks ago had been. A major ingredient in many Malaysian dishes is belacan, which is described on the menu as "shrimp paste." Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for Belacan:

Shrimp paste or shrimp sauce, is a common ingredient used in Southeast Asian and Southern Chinese cuisine. It is known as terasi (also spelled trassi, terasie) in Indonesian, kapi in Thai, belacan (also spelled belachan, blachang, balachong) in Malay, and bagoong alamang/aramang in Filipino.

It is made from fermented ground shrimp. To many Westerners unfamiliar with this condiment, the smell can be extremely repulsive . . . [emphasis added]

Yes, "extremely repulsive" is how I'd describe it. The sauce on B's fish was by far the worst-smelling food I've encountered in all my life. Strangely, it didn't taste all that bad at all, and to our credit, we did eat the entire fish. But damn was that smell awful.

Here's an excerpt from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's review of Peninsula:

There is no symbol on the menu to warn diners about smelly dishes, but perhaps there should be. . . . The waiter tried to warn us away from the penang rojak, a salad of cucumber, jicama, mango and pineapple, drizzled with a dark sweet sauce made with belacan, a fermented shrimp paste. He told us that he personally couldn't stand the smell of it, and that he had been told to discourage Westerners from ordering it.

We received no such warning, and as B later pointed out, if I had read this beforehand I probably would've insisted on ordering it. I'm kind of an idiot that way :-)

Here's Wikipedia on the history of shrimp paste:

Many shrimp pastes seem inedible to those unfamiliar with Southeast Asian cooking, so the development of such a potentially repelling food can seem odd. Possibly, fishermen first created the salted aged shrimp product as a means of preserving their catch. Another theory is that it was created so tiny apparently unmarketable shrimp could be sold. Whatever the reason, shrimp paste is now an integral part of highly regarded Southeast Asian cuisine. The shrimp paste industry has been important to the development of many coastal Asian communities.

And here's how it's made:

After being caught, small shrimp are unloaded, rinsed and drained before being dried. Drying can be done on plastic mats on the ground in the sun, on metal beds on low stilts, or using other methods. After several days, the shrimp-salt mixture will darken and turn into a thick pulp.

If the shrimp used to produce the paste were small, it is ready to be served as soon as the individual shrimp have decayed beyond recognition. If the shrimp are larger, fermentation will take longer and the pulp will be ground to provide a smoother consistency. The fermentation/grinding process is usually repeated several times until the paste fully matures. The paste is then dried and cut into bricks by the villagers to be sold. Dried shrimp paste does not require refrigeration.

As B remarked, "It doesn't require refrigeration because it's already gone bad."

Oh well, live and learn.

I also had a pineapple-coconut smoothie with my meal . . . and it came with "black pearls," which are pea-sized balls of black tapioca floating in the drink. B and I had read about this Asian trend and I wanted to give it a go. I found the oddest part to be the huge straw they give so you can suck up the tapioca balls. The black pearls didn't do it for me, but at least now I can say I gave it a try.

Well, like I said, the non-Belacan dishes we've had at Peninsula were all incredibly good, so we'll be back there soon enough. I just can't get over how bad that smell was.