Chimbridge Singlish Dictionary

definitions

noun

1. a Peranakan dish consisting of chicken (ayam) stewed with buah keluak in a gravy of pounded spices including tamarind (assam), candlenuts, turmeric, chilli, lemongrass, galangal, and belacan. In some recipes, the flesh of the buah keluak nut is be mixed with ground meat and stuffed back in before stewing, while others let the flesh be. In both cases, nevertheless, the dish is served with the flesh still in the nut's shell as part of the presentation. It takes a lot of influence from Indonesian cuisine.
   The dish is infamous, like many other Peranakan dishes, for its incredibly long preparation time; for example, the buah keluak has to be boiled, buried, and soaked for up to forty days beforehand to draw out the toxic hydrogen cyanide naturally present in the raw nuts. This process results in the nuts turning the dark black colour that they familiarly appear with in the dish.