Brunei: vegan nasi katok

It’s been a while since we visited South East Asia on our vegan world tour but this stop in Brunei brings us back. This time, we whip up a vegan nasi katok recipe, a popular Bruneian street food where deep-fried oyster mushrooms are served with a spicy sambal and steamed rice. Read on to learn more about the peculiarly named “knock rice” dish or jump straight to the recipe.

Brunei and Bruneian cuisine

Once a powerful Islamic sultanate and more recently a British protectorate, today Brunei is a small country on the northern coast of the tropical island Borneo in South East Asia. The country is contained completely within Malaysia (which, incidentally, was our last stop in SE Asia) and is actually split into two parts by a narrow Malaysian landpiece ​[1]​. The country’s half million people are mostly of Malay descent with a sizeable Chinese population and with Islam as the main religion. Oil and gas is Brunei’s main industry and gives the citizens one of the highest incomes per capita in all of Asia.

Bruneian cuisine and dishes

Food in Brunei is similar to neighbouring Malaysia with Chinese influences and some local specialties. Rice, noodles, fish, land animals, coconut, and plenty of spices are all on the menu ​[2], [3], [4], [5], [6]​. As in most of South East Asia, you will find fried rice, fried noodles, different curries, soups, and many types of bread. Such as leavened, light and fluffy roti kanai, South Asian fried flatbreads, also called roti, and steamed, Chinese buns with different fillings.

Sticky rice, or glutinous rice, is used in many different steamed packets with or without filling. Kelupis are a popular snack where the glutinous rice is cooked with coconut and pandan leaves and then wrapped in nyirik leaves and steamed to finish. Eat them on their own or serve with fresh fruit, curry, or some rendang. If you fill the rice ball with some sambal or other savory stuffing before steaming or grilling, you instead get a dish called pangang. And if you cook the rice in a hollowed-out bamboo over an open fire, you will have made lemang.

Often toted as Brunei’s national dish, ambuyat was born out of WWII rationing. The starchy interior of the sago palm tree, purchased as a powder similar to tapioca starch, is mixed with water to create a glue-like, mildly flavoured substance. To eat, you use a pair of special chopsticks called chandas to grab some ambuyat from the communal bowl, dip in your condiments, and then swallow whole ​[7], [8]​. While ambuyat is Brunei’s national dish, nasi katok, or “knock rice”, is the country’s national street food.

Nasi katok

A Bruneian street food celebrity, the dish nasi katok is usually translated as “rice knock”, “knock rice” or “knock knock rice”. The dish is a full meal and consists of battered and fried chicken, an onion-chili sambal, and, as the name suggests, steamed rice. Apart from being delicious and filling, the meal is popular due to its affordability and is often enjoyed after a day’s work.

The rice and fried chicken are served with one important condiment, an onion and chili sambal. Sambal is a category of cooked or raw, chili-based condiments popular in South East Asia, likely originating in Indonesia ​[9]​. A sambal is similar to a chutney, relish, paste, firm-ish sauce, salsa, or jam in that it is a broad category of somewhat liquid-y condiments with varying recipes and consistency. In the case of nasi katok, the sambal is based on onion and chili with a few different spices and some tamarind or lime to balance the acidity.

Origin of the name nasi katok

There are a few different origin stories for nasi kaotk and its interesting name. In one such story, a hungry traveler went from door to door, knocking and asking for food. The food they finally ended up with was rice and fried chicken ​[5], [8]​. Another story has it that a woman named Katok ran a food stall serving this sumptuous meal which became very popular among local workers, inspiring other stalls to open and sell the same food ​[10]​.

The origin most often cited is that the name, “knock rice”, stems from how you order the food. The meal is often sold from people’s homes and to order it, you knock on the door or window to announce your presence and summon the vendor to buy some affordable deliciousness ​[3], [11], [12], [13], [14]​. This seems to be the case particularly late at night in older times, when few restaurants and food stalls were open. Apart from having the most sources for this particular origin of the name, I find it more plausible than a specific traveler or food stall vendor simply due to the combination of fried chicken and rice not being very far-fetched. That is, it probably didn’t require a sole inventor such as a hungry traveler or a woman named Katok.

How to make nasi katok

As with all dishes, there are many different ways to make nasi katok. While the name simply means “knock rice”, the titular rice is served with chili sambal and fried chicken in the omnivore version of this dish. The chicken itself is marinated in spices like garlic, ginger, turmeric, black pepper, chili powder, and soy sauce before being battered with eggs, dipped in flour and deep-fried. Sometimes the flour contains spices similar to those used in the marinade to ensure a flavourful meal ​[11], [15], [16], [17]​, though you can take a shortcut and skip the marinade by adding all spices to the frying batter ​[18]​. After marinating, the chicken is dipped in beaten eggs, coated with flour and deep-fried.

The sambal is maybe the defining element since it carries a lot of the flavour in this dish. To prepare the sambal, onions and garlic are pureed and cooked with ground, fresh chilis ​[15], [17], [18], [19]​. Varying from cook to cook, spices and other ingredients help create the final, complex flavour profile of the sambal. Popular additional ingredients include ginger, stock powder, shrimp paste, sugar, and chili powder with some tamarind to help balance acidity. While it seems the sambal is quintessential, some cooks serve their rice and chicken with a buttermilk sauce ​[11]​ or sweet chili sauce instead ​[10]​.

How to make vegan nasi katok

The main challenge of preparing a vegan nasi katok is to replace the fried chicken with something more suitable. Luckily, fried chicken is a popular comfort food around the world and there are a lot of recipes to create a vegan fried chicken substitute. The most common vegan fried chicken substitute I’ve come across, both before and during researching this post, is battered, deep-fried oyster mushrooms. Not to be confused with the king oyster mushroom with its long, thick, and smooth stem, the oyster mushroom has a widening stem covered in gills which gradually turns into a large hat, perfect for a spicy coating. To substitute chicken in vegan fried chicken, the oyster mushrooms are coated with a batter and dipped in flour before being deep-fried. Some cooks prefer to marinate the mushrooms before dipping in batter ​[20]​ while others simply season the batter and/or flour ​[21], [22], [23], [24]​.

For my vegan nasi katok, I went with vegan-traditional deep-fried oyster mushrooms to replace the chicken. Rather than marinating the mushrooms, I rubbed the mushrooms with soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and spices before dipping them in a spiced batter followed by spiced flour. I took a shortcut for the flour and batter: I mixed flour with spices and then split it, reserving half for the dry coating and adding water to the other half to create a batter. For the sambal itself, I used a recipe that was a mix of a few other recipes ​[15], [17], [18], [19]​ . The only substitution required was for the shrimp paste. Thankfully, The Messy Vegan Cook has a few suggestions here, such as dark miso or the Korean fermented bean paste doenjang which I decided to use since I already had some ​[25]​.

Conclusion

This vegan nasi katok was delicious, but who doesn’t love deep-fried mushrooms? The freshly fried mushrooms had crunch and great flavour from all the spices and paired very well with the chili sambal. The sambal did not taste like I expected. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I envisioned something hotter, more acidic, and more chili-forward. But it was actually a bit bitter and more solid than I imagined: more of an onion jam than a runny sauce. But maybe I was too careful with the chilies; I only added two green and one red. My sambal also turned out more of a dark brown than most of the ones I saw during my research. I think I was a bit heavy on the tamarind paste though both soy sauce and doenjang (replacing shrimp paste) contributed. While the sambal was a bit bitter on its own, it was great when combined with the richness of the deep-fried mushrooms and the sweetness of the white rice and greatly improved the overall dish.

That’s it for our trip to Brunei. Join me again next time when we head back to Southern Europe for another tasty meal. If you don’t want to miss the next stop, you can subscribe to my email list and I will send you an alert when the post is live.

Vegan nasi katok recipe

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Vegan nasi katok

Servings 2 people

Ingredients

Chili sambal

• ½ red onion
• ½ onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 pc ginger, ~3 cm
• 1 tbsp oil e.g. canola
• 2-3 green chilies e.g. serrano
• 1-3 red Thai chilies
• 1 tsp tamarind paste
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp doenjang or dark miso
• 1 tsp sugar

Mushrooms

• 6-8 large oyster mushrooms
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 cm ginger
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp turmeric
• ½ tsp chili powder

Batter

• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• ½ tsp ground ginger
• ½ tsp chili powder
• ½ tsp black pepper
• ½ tsp salt
• 200 mL all-purpose flour
• 1 tbsp corn starch
• oil for deep-frying e.g. canola

Instructions

Chili sambal

• Peel onion, garlic, and ginger. Chop into large pieces and blend to a smooth paste. Add water as needed for blending.
• Heat the oil and cook the onion blend for 10-15 minutes.
• Meanwhile, slice the fresh chilis, deseed, and blend with some water.
• Add chilis to onions after they have cooked for 10-15 minutes.
• Add doenjang/dark miso, tamarind paste, soy sauce, and sugar.
• Continue cooking for 15 minutes.
• Set aside and let cool.

Mushroom prep

• Prepare the rub by grating garlic and ginger. Mix with soy sauce, turmeric, and chili powder. Mix.
• Prepare 6-8 large oyster mushrooms (for 2 people). Coat the mushrooms with he spice mix.

Batter

• Mix flour with cornstarch and coriander, turmeric, garlic powder, ground ginger, chili powder, and salt to taste.
• To make the batter, take 100 mL of the seasoned flour and mix with 100 mL water.
• You should now have 1 bowl with wet batter and 1 bowl with dry flour.

Deep-frying mushrooms

• Set up the deep-frying workflow. Place spice-coated mushrooms, liquid batter, and the bowl with dry flour next to your stove. Prepare a plate with paper towels for the finished mushrooms.
• Heat oil in a pot or a wok. Around 150-170℃
• Dip a mushroom in the wet batter and coat it completely. Dip again in the dry flour and coat completely.
• Add mushroom(s) to the hot oil. You can fry a few mushrooms at a time but don't overcrowd the pot/pan.

  Fry until golden brown. Transfer to paper towel.

Serve

• Serve fried mushrooms with white rice and sambal.

References