For the newer posts on Penang Hokkien Mee, please click here and here.)
This divine bowl of Penang Hokkien Mee (Prawn Noodle) took me months of hard work and patience. I mean months, not days, and certainly not hours.
To concoct a pot of pure shrimpy stock that is signature to this Penang hawker food dish, one has to have heaps of shrimp heads. Yes, I am talking about a ziploc bag (a BIG one!) full of shrimp heads. While I eat shrimp all the time, it’s a completely different matter when it comes to saving up their heads…
It’s impossible to get good Hokkien Mee here in the US, so for the past few months, I bought only head-on shrimps. Patiently and religiously I saved up their heads so I could make this at home…
This past weekend, the ziploc bag was finally so full that I could no longer zip it up. I quickly rushed out to the nearest Asian supermarket and got myself all the other ingredients–pork ribs, bean sprouts, noodles, etc.–and started cooking this famous hawker delicacy. The end result was a pot full of real prawny stock that was as close as what you get in Penang. It was really satisfying slurping up the soup and had unlimited topping of pork ribs that fell off the bones! Mmmm…
