TacoCat's TrEats #29: Surfing in Satay Sauce 🍡

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Cover image source: Living + Nomads

Hey Steemit!

Many of my recent food posts have been about Singaporean food, so I thought I'd change it up a little and post about food from another country; although it is very similar to Singapore regardless.

Earlier this year, my family and I took a road trip across the border to Malaysia for my cousin's wedding! The wedding was to be held in Malacca, which is about 3 hours from Singapore.

Capture courtesy of Google Maps

My mother was born in Malaysia, so I have quite a few relatives there and we used to drive up to Malacca to visit them for Chinese New Year. We haven't been back in quite a long time so it was exciting to visit again after so long! (And eat all the yummy food too! 😉)

Malaysia is pretty well known for their cheaper and (some would argue) yummier food compared to Singapore. Since I'm technically half-blood (what is this, Harry Potter? 🤔), I can't really pick a side and I would say these food wars are kinda pointless. Why don't we all just eat and be happy amirite.
Hehe Food Wars geddit.
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Source: comixology
(it's not really funny if I have to provide a source but oh well ¯_(ツ)_/ ¯ )

Anyway for our first dinner in Malacca, we decided to revisit old memories of eating Satay Celup!

Source: travelmalaysia.me

So if you've never had/heard of satay celup before, it's where an assortment of raw and semi-cooked seafood, meat and vegetables on skewers are dunked into a hot boiling pot of satay gravy. Another name for it is steamboat satay, which I think is pretty apt, since it's basically like a chinese hotpot but with satay sauce as the 'soup base'!

Source:yienyien.com

I'm pretty sure satay celup is an authentic Malacca dish, because even my relatives from KL haven't eaten it in a long time.
I'm not sure if Singapore actually has any authentic satay celup stalls, because the satay stalls I see in hawker centres are just regular satay stalls. Granted, they do serve the normal peanut sauce on the side, but it's not the same as satay celup.

Source: misstamchiak

We went to a famous satay celup restaurant called McQuek's Sate Celup. I believe they have a few outlets but we went to the main branch at Bandar Hilir.

This is what the restaurant looks like; it's open-air with a couple of fans so it can get pretty hot, especially with the boiling pots of satay sauce on every table (and the Malacca weather!). 😓 But they have plenty of cold drinks, so you can cool yourself down with fresh fruit juices which is exactly what we did.

Other than that, McQuek's is pretty clean and comfortable; better than the ones I remember going to many years ago.

Anyway the restaurant is pretty self-service, so the first step was to choose what kind of satay you wanted from the wall of refrigerators!

They have plenty of different meat, vegetable and seafood skewers.
There's chicken, duck and meat balls.

Vegetables, mushrooms, fishballs, beancurd.

The next step is soaking the skewers in the boiling pot of satay sauce!

After they're cooked, it's time to eat!

I remember when I was younger I used to soak the sticks in cool water after they were done cooking because I found the sauce too spicy for me all those years ago. Now I love spicy stuff! And the sauce is hardly that spicy anyway, so I'm not sure what I was so afraid of back then.

By the end, I was so stuffed! Mostly of drinks because it was so hot I had to order another juice.

Look at all those sticks!

It had to have been at least 10 years or so since the last time I ate satay celup and it was so good to be able to relive those yummy memories again! It's definitely an interesting experience you won't find elsewhere and I would definitely recommend it if you're in the area.

Thanks for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!