Orh kueh is what we Singaporeans call this savoury Teochew steamed taro pudding. In local Singapore-English, we also call it “yam cake”, as the purple Asian yam or taro is the main ingredient.
Yesterday, a foodie friend introduced me to perhaps the best-tasting rendition I’d had in quite a while: from Boon Keng Food Stall in MacPherson Market & Food Centre.
I hardly venture into MacPherson, a relatively grungy, working-class neighbourhood - fairly sterile as it’s an old public housing neighbourhood, and with industrial plants that dot its periphery. A few subway stops away is colourful, bustling Geylang Serai, so MacPherson is never somewhere I’d thought of going to find good food. I’ve changed my mind since - MacPherson Market & Food Centre, despite its dated, tired look, actually contained some hidden dining gems.
Boon Keng Food Stall offers not just “orh kueh”, but also paired with “chee cheong fun” - steamed rice rolls, slathered with sweet “hoi sin” sauce and spicy-red chili sauce here.
The stall also offers the quintessential and most common Singaporean breakfast item: “economy beehoon mee”. I usually order a mix of fried Hokkien noodles and thin rice noodles (“bee hoon”), plus fried luncheon meat (Spam) and fried eggs.
It was intriguing to me to find sweet applications of various yams in ex-India Asia, because in India, they are widely used but (almost?) always savory!
I think there may be a few different things that get called Taro.
The purple yam I know and love is called “kand” or “ratalu” in western India — that’s what your pictures look like to me. They come in irregular, sometimes a bit knobby, medium-sized forms. Color stays pretty true when steamed / pressure cooked and then fried, but cooking further can dull the brightness.
Then there’s suran / elephant’s foot yam, which is a light beige / pale orange inside, ugly muddy brown outside. Much larger pieces, usually cut up into halves or quarters before selling.
What we call colocasia / taro is much smaller - width of 2 fingers, length of a pinky. Also dirty brown on the outside, cream inside. They are boiled, peeled, and then either sliced and fried (like steak fries), or cooked into a vegetable. Very sticky.
The leaves of this colocasia are also widely used in some regions. Have to be careful about picking them as some plants (or maybe some leaves, not entire plants) cause a reaction. They used to grow wild behind my grandparents’ house, but only the housekeeper knew how to pick the non-itchy leaves (I remember that itch well, ugh).
