Housewife Opens Yishun Hawker Stall With Her Son Selling Hard-To-Find Hokkien Salted Duck
Homemaker Sylvia Chew uses her restaurant cook father's recipe for the salted ducks, which are marinated for three days and offered with porridge, rice or beehoon.
Cantonese-style roast ducks or Teochew braised ducks are common enough offerings at hawker stalls, but the Hokkien salted duck is still a relatively rare find. It consists of a whole poached bird marinated in salt and spices, and savoured with a chilli padi and lime dip.
Unlike the swarthy-skinned ducks favoured by other dialect groups, this Hokkien salted duck looks deceptively plain, with its original pale yellow colour intact. It also has brinier flavour and not as juicy meat, as the salt draws out the moisture in the duck.
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New Hokkien salted duck stall
Notable stalls that sell this old-school dish are few and far between, including Ah Ee Traditional Hokkien Salted Duck and Benson Salted Duck Rice at a Toa Payoh kopitiam. Ah Ee, which had operated in Sembawang Hills Food Centre, inexplicably went on a seven-year hiatus in 2015. It resurfaced this year, in a far-flung industrial canteen in Kaki Bukit.
But a new hawker stall selling Hokkien salted duck recently opened – called Home Treasure Salted Duck, the tiny unit is located at a coffeeshop at Yishun Ring Road. It’s run by housewife-turned-hawker Sylvia Chew, 56, along with her son Marcus Sim, 26. His older bro Gideon (pictured with Sylvia above), 29, who works as a financial services director, also helps his mother out on weekends.
Salted duck recipe came from hawker’s dad
According to the bubbly lady boss, the recipe for her salted duck came from her Teochew father, whom she says used to work [as a cook] in a Chinese restaurant. “But that was more than 30 years ago, so I really can’t remember [the details] now,” she laughs.
While her version is reminiscent of the Hokkien duck we tried at Ah Ee – down to the duck’s yellowish skin and piquant lime-infused dip – she’s not exactly sure of her recipe’s provenance. “My dad never told me which [dialect group it belonged to]. I’ve asked family and friends, and some say it’s Hokkien, some say Teochew. For me, I just know that my cooking has a bit of Teochew influence, a bit of Cantonese, a bit of Hokkien. Everything also got,” she chirps.
Housewife, home chef, hawker
Tthe longtime homemaker never had any formal culinary training. She began cooking salted duck about a decade ago on special occasions after getting the recipe from her dad. “I shared it with my friends and relatives and they said, ‘Eh, you can sell this!’ But I held off for a few years until my son [Marcus] wanted to start a hawker stall,” she explains.
According to Sylvia, Marcus had left his job as an interior designer as “he felt that he wasn’t suited for [interior design]”. He decided to try being a hawker and considered opening his own ban mian stall, but had to ditch the idea as “many coffeeshops already have ban mian [stalls], so it was very hard to secure a space”. It was then that Sylvia decided to help him by offering her father’s salted duck recipe.
They decided to test the waters for this rare dish first as a home-based business.* But Sylvia’s older son Gideon shares that the response was “successful but erratic”. He recalls, “Some days, we would get orders for 15 ducks and just one duck on other days. Once, we had an order for half a duck – what to do with the other half?” he says.
Opening a hawker stall was the next logical step as it would allow them to scale their operations, he explains. “The preparation time for one duck is two hours. And the prep time for ten ducks is also two hours,” he says. “We were also limited by our fridge space, and your house gets really messy when you cook at home.”
Hawker biz is just as unpredictable
While Sylvia shares that her Yishun kopitiam spot is rather “quiet, especially during dinner” (they picked the location as it was nearer to their home in Sembawang), business has been picking up since she opened last November. She managed to sell 50 ducks on Chinese New Year eve alone, but even with orders picking up, she is now facing a new problem in the form of rising food costs. “Our margins have decreased a lot. We have not increased our prices for now – we’re trying to hold on as long as we can,” she adds.
Sylvia also shares that she has faced some “culture shock” after making the shift from homemaker to hawker. “Sometimes when you look out and see the line – very scary leh. I enjoy [being a hawker], but the moment I reach home, I cannot move anymore,” she says. “I’m very thankful for my husband. He does all the housework now, and he always waits till I reach home to take me out to dinner.”
The menu
There’s only one dish on the menu, the Salted Duck ($46 for whole duck; $26 for half) served with rice, porridge or beehoon. Sylvia also offers braised pork rice as an alternative for those who don’t like duck.
Salted Duck Porridge, $4.10 (8 DAYS Pick!)
To mask the ducks’ natural gaminess, Sylvia and Marcus coat the birds in a secret three-ingredient mix – obviously, salt is one of them – and leave ’em to marinate in the fridge for three days. The ducks are then poached. “Actually, the recipe is very simple. It’s just the preparation [that takes a long time],” Sylvia tells us.
Despite its name, the duck isn’t all that salty – most of its saltiness is concentrated in the bird’s fatty, yellow-tinged skin, with only a mellow savouriness that’s imparted on the firm, but still moist, flesh within. The breast meat we get with this dish is tender enough, but still retains a bit of bite.
Home Treasure’s duck is less salty, and a tad firmer compared to when we had Ah Ee’s salted duck years ago, though it’s a decent pairing with porridge. If you need extra zing, drizzle the meat with some of the lime juice, soy sauce and chilli padi dip that’s served on the side. The citrus and spice notes are great at tempering the salty oiliness of the skin.
Despite her Teochew heritage, Sylvia’s “homestyle” porridge veers toward the thicker Hokkien version instead of watery Teochew muay. It’s cooked in the same broth that the duck was poached in, which gives the porridge a subtle meatiness that we want more of. The [fried] garlic bits scattered over is a nice aromatic touch too.
Signature Salted Duck Rice (Drumstick), $6.60
Unfortunately, we can’t say the same for the hawker’s duck rice – it seems that Sylvia is still getting used to her large commercial-sized rice cooker, as she tells us candidly that she’s had problems with her rice being burnt or too mushy. Today’s batch of rice, cooked in duck broth, unfortunately comes out overcooked.
Mushiness aside, the grains only have the barest whiff of duck and nothing much else. Sylvia swaps our duck broth-spiked rice with plain rice, but that’s also too wet. We say go for the porridge while she figures her rice cooker out.
The overcooked braised egg doesn’t quite hit the mark too, and so too the bland bowl of duck broth – which tastes mostly of pepper – on the side (usually, chicken rice stalls that serve the poaching broth as soup throw in some cabbage for extra sweetness). A pity, since the drumstick meat is pretty succulent. The standard set for duck rice without a drumstick goes for $4.60.
Braised Pork Rice, $4.80
Sylvia’s recipe for braised pork (which she adapted from a video recipe on YouTube) is more sweet than savoury, though the pork belly is fatty and tender.
Bottom line
Home Treasure Salted Duck’s take on the rare Hokkien salted duck dish is salty, moist and tender where it should be. The accompanying chilli padi dip lends a further layer of flavour. However, as Sylvia is still getting used to her new job as a hawker, other dishes like her rice and broth are still being fine-tuned. For now, go for her tasty salted duck porridge.
