The Experience of Sarawak Laksa

I have ordered some laksa paste from Malaysia long time ago. I've been a long-time fans of laksa and this time I really managed to make some. It'd be quite trouble to prepare the laksa soup from nothing (My Malaysian colleague didn't agree with it. She still said its easy although it'd take 2 hours to prepare the soup!)

Actually its not too difficult and here are the steps and sequence:

1. Pour 2:1 chicken broth and laksa paste and 1 portion of coconut milk into a saucepan, boil and cook for 45 mins. I added some chopped and lightly-fried garlic and a couple slices of ginger as well. I guess probably adding some chucks of lemon grass (香茅) would help to strengthen the favour (actually its v strong already)
   
2. Cut the chicken fillet into strips and season it with fish sauce (魚露), lemon grass, pepper, garlic salt and sugar. Salt (醃) for about 30mins
   
3. Cut the heads of the prawns and remove their shell. Actually to make it easier, you'd shower the prawns with boiling water and it'd make removing their shell a lot easier. Then season them with some salt and pepper.
4. Lightly fry the chicken strips and prawns with some peanut oil. This time I put some of the laksa sauce 've been cooking (just some) and fry the chicken and prawns with it. You just need to lightly fry them to an extent that the colour of their (chicken & prawns) surface changed but with the centre raw. You'd cook them in the laksa soup later before you serve it.
   
5. Pour boiling water into the bowl of tofu puff (豆腐卜) to remove the oil at the oily surface and cut them into slice.
6. Add the prawn heads into the soup (at the 45th min) and add noodles after one hour of boiling of the laksa soup
7. Add bean sprouts and noodles into the laksa soup and boil for a couple of minutes
8. Add fried sliced fish (炸魚片), prawns & chicken strips and cook them until done
9. Serve as shown on the picture above. Put some chopped laksa leaves and chopped shallots (蔥) on top of the laksa.

In fact to enhance the coconut milk favour you'd add some more coconut milk about 5 minutes before you serve the laksa.

Enjoy!