$60 “Dream Hokkien Mee" And Excellent $12 Ngoh Hiang

A former tax consultant, Jeremy’s passion for food led him to start Preparazzi, an upscale catering company that services clients like French luxury fashion houses and Swiss watch manufactures. Over the years, he served as a consultant chef for the likes of private members club Straits Clan, founded eateries like Bazuka Yakibuta in Great World City (which he’s no longer a part of), and held popular pop-up concepts like Rakusaba, which served laksa deconstructed Japanese style. “Because of the Covid-19 situation, our regular event work has slowed down a lot,” said Jeremy from his central kitchen along Frankel Avenue. “So I thought since people want to avoid going out and prefer to eat at home, this is a great chance for us to try out this new format.

The same excellent-quality pork belly is hand-cut and mixed with some chopped prawns and water chestnuts to make the filling for this light-on-the-five-spice bean curd skin rolls. What makes this ngoh hiang special is a whole prawn that sits in the centre of each roll, giving it lovely sweetness and added bite. We like that it is tender and robustly seasoned.

The debut dish on Dreamshop is his “dream Hokkien Mee”. From the get-go, Jeremy and his team found making the stock for it a huge challenge. “The stock is very expensive and time-consuming. It takes 16 hours in total, just to make the stocks,” he explains. Instead of the usual one, Jeremy’s dish utilises two stocks: prawn and pork. To make the former, he roasts tiger prawn heads, boil them in water for several hours, and then blitzes the mixture to a pulp before boiling it again to thoroughly extract all the flavour from the crustaceans. The pork stock is made Japanese tonkotsu-style where trotters are brought to a rolling boil for six hours to break down their collagen and yield a milky broth. Jeremy only uses hormone-free probiotic pork from Canada. “Half a litre of stock goes into one portion of the noodles, which feeds about three to four people,” he adds.

Instead of traditional yellow noodles, whose strong alkaline flavour he does not enjoy, Jeremy uses firm Sanuki udon and thin bee hoon. These noodles are braised in the combined stocks with lots of lard and some garlic, and later topped with tiger prawns, clams, and slices of the hormone-free probiotic Canadian pork belly.

The result, when we try the dish, is heavy with the flavour of pork, which drowns out the sweetness of the prawns. When we mention this to Jeremy, he gamely says that in his next iteration, he will tweak the recipe to make the prawn flavour more pronounced. We liked that he uses the slippery udon, which eliminates the “kee” or alkaline flavour of traditional yellow wheat noodles. Each packet of Hokkien mee comes with a bottle of Batu Lesung Spice Company Sambal Belacan, which unlike most of its ilk, is gentle on the fermented prawn paste so that its flavour is clean and sharp. Pictured above is the half portion that comes with ngoh hiang or chicken wings for $45 (feeds two pax). The $60 one feeds three generously, perhaps four people with more modest appetites.

Seasoned hawkers would be impressed by Jeremy’s KL-style char siew, which is made from Canadian pork belly and cooked in a simple marinade of sugar, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, hoi sin sauce and garlic. After a good blitz in a hot oven, it is glazed with honey and then grilled again to give it a good, caramelised char. The meat is full of flavour and yieldingly tender; its gleaming glaze is thick and sticky with a good balance of sweet and salty. If he opened a hawker stall selling this char siew, we’d be first in line. FYI: Jeremy also makes a mean sio bak (roast crackling pork) at $158 for 2kg.

Fresh, hormone-free chicken wings are marinated in Batu Lesung Spice Company’s marinade with a citrusy lilt, probably from the likes of lemongrass or kaffir lime. It penetrates the wings, giving them a clean (because it doesn't have the depth of belacan), bright sambal flavour with a fiery kick. This is one of the ways in which Jeremy shows off the flavours of his bottled products so it’s a good means of sampling what the range has to offer.

With this pop-up, Jeremy has started selling a smaller portion of his mother’s popular kueh salat sold under the brand Mrs Kueh online. Now, you can buy a 4.5-by-7.5-inch kueh salat for $40 at dreamshopsg.com and on Mrs Kueh’s website (https://www.mrskueh.com/orderkuehsalat). If you ask us, this is the best commercially available kueh salat. It has a smooth, custardy and fragrant layer of kaya atop beautifully marbled butterfly pea flower blue-and-white coconut-infused glutinous rice that somehow manages to remain moist and light instead of the usually stodgy stuff. If it tastes familiar, it’s because Jeremy also supplies kueh salat to The Clan Café at The Straits Clan, which sells it by the slice.