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Hawker fare that is ready to heat

Convenience store chain 7-Eleven and new and old hawker brands have teamed up to sell meals that you can pop into a microwave

Food Editor

Published

2022-08-07

Champions of authenticity will hate the very idea. Night owls and young people will love the convenience. And those who like to ruminate about hawker food and hawker culture will be busy chewing on this development.

Convenience store chain 7-Eleven has partnered a clutch of new and old hawker brands to sell ready-to-eat dishes such as ban mian, bak chor mee, chwee kueh and satay beehoon in 420 of its 460 outlets across Singapore.

Singapore's hawker culture was put on Unesco's intangible cultural heritage list in late 2020, but the ecosystem is constantly under threat of extinction.

Elderly hawkers give up the trade every year; few young people want to take their place; and the pandemic, with the on-again, off-again dining restrictions, sounded the death knell for some hawkers.

7-Eleven's Hawker Fiesta programme offers food from Famous Eunos Bak Chor Mee, Qiu Lian Ban Mee, Terry Katong Laksa, Chew Kee Soy Sauce Chicken, Lao Chao Zhou, Legend Scissors Cut Curry Rice and Jian Bo Shui Kueh.

Other offerings come from Andes by Astons, restaurateur and television personality Sultanul Arifin and curry puff chain Old Chang Kee, which started in 1956 in a Mackenzie Road coffee shop.

Most of their offerings are now available and range in price from $3.20 for Old Chang Kee's Curry O' Sandwich to $6.50 for Grilled Black Pepper Chicken With Mac & Cheese from Andes, the halal offshoot of the Astons steak chain.

Jian Bo's chwee kueh and chee cheong fun will debut on Aug 17.

The food will be available until Aug 30, mid-September for Jian Bo, and the best-selling ones will stay on the shelves, says Ms Angela Fong, the chain's commercial head for fresh and ready-to-eat food.

Currently, the two best-selling items are Old Chang Kee's Curry O' Sandwich and Legend Scissors Cut Curry Rice With Chicken Cutlet, Cabbage & Egg, she tells The Sunday Times. About 5,000 of each item are sold every week.

Coming in at 4,000 meals a week are the meals by Andes. All the others chalk up sales of about 3,500 meals a week.

Taste test of 10 meals

Hawker food cooked a la minute at the stall is worlds away from microwaving a tray at home or in a convenience store. That said, 7-Eleven's hawker meals are, for the most part, palatable.

All the food tested here is halal, except for the offerings from Jian Bo, which are made without pork and lard. I reheated the food in the microwave following the instructions on the packaging. All the food survived the nuclear holocaust intensity of microwaving.

For the next round of ready-to-eat hawker meals, 7-Eleven would do well to give nutritional and calorie information for all the products, not just for some.

1 Andes by Astons Chargrilled Chicken With Mac & Cheese ($6.50)

Chicken thigh is indestructible and the boneless one in this meal cooked up juicy. The punchy pepper sauce has potential for lots of applications. Shell-shaped pasta coated with an orange cheese sauce is on the mushy side, and the sauce is not as cheesy as I would like.

2 Jian Bo Shui Kueh ($3.30)

The rice cakes reheat in the microwave well, and there is a generous amount of preserved radish topping and sambal rich with dried shrimps to pile on top of the four chwee kueh. It all tastes good too.

What lets this offering down is the packaging. The plastic film on top is difficult to peel back, so I end up stabbing holes in it with a knife before sticking the box in the microwave. Wrestling the plastic off, with hot chye poh bubbling underneath, is not fun either.

3 Chef Arifin's Tandoori Chicken With Tomato Basmati Rice ($4.50)

The aroma that wafts from the tray when I peel back the plastic is tantalising. And the tomato flavour comes through very strongly in the rice. While they are well-seasoned and not dried out, the chicken pieces look mangled. Neither mint nor coriander flavour is apparent in the mint chutney, despite the green specks. But the tangy yogurt counters the richness of the chicken and rice very well.

4 Qiu Lian Minced Chicken Dry Ban Mee ($5.80)

A double-layer bowl, with the ban mian and fried anchovies at the bottom.

This is one of the pricier meals, but is worth paying for because the toppings are generous and the chilli that ties everything together is piquant and delicious. Of course, the anchovies have zero crunch, so the textural contrast you get from chewy noodles, soft ground meat and crisp anchovies is missing.

But the chilli sauce makes up for it. In my opinion, the best of the lot.

5 Legend Scissors Cut Curry Rice With Chicken Cutlet, Cabbage & Egg ($4.50)

Any crunch in the breading for the chicken disappears the minute the tray goes into the microwave. This meal also has a generous amount of chicken, although it looks hacked up rather than chopped up. The thin curry sauce livens things up a bit. I would pass on the rubbery fried egg and the cabbage is way too salty.

6 Famous Eunos Minced Chicken Noodle Soup ($4.30)

Chicken broth with depth of flavour, check. Springy flat mee kia, check. Juicy minced chicken, check. The only fault I can find with this meal? The wontons. The skin is pretty silky, but the chicken filling is chewy when it should be light and cloud-like.

7 Old Chang Kee Curry O' Sandwich ($3.20)

The taste of the chain's curry puff filling is unmistakable, but instead of shortcrust pastry, the filling is sandwiched between slices of white bread. I suppose this is a healthier way to enjoy the filling, since there is no deep-fried pastry involved. The sandwich is much better reheated in a toaster oven. Microwaved bread just does not cut it.

8 Ghim Moh Lao Chao Zhou Satay Beehoon ($5)

Another good one, although it is not perfect. What I find strange is that some strips of cuttlefish have a perfect QQ texture, while other strips disintegrate to mush. But the satay sauce is aromatic, with the main notes coming from ground coriander. Somehow, the kangkong manages to retain some crunch and taupok is a better vehicle for transporting peanut sauce to my belly, compared to beehoon.

9 Terry Katong Laksa ($4.30)

No prawns, no cockles, but still worth eating. The gravy is just rich enough and the rice noodles reheat perfectly. All I want is lots more laksa leaves.

10 Chew Kee Braised Soy Sauce Chicken With Hor Fun ($5.80)

This meal comes in a two-layer bowl. At the bottom are two small squares of tau kwa in some of the brand's soya braising sauce. It tastes more savoury than the sweetish version on the top layer, which is meant to be tossed with the rice noodles.

I am glad the two quail eggs are not fossilised, and indestructible chicken thigh works its magic here too. But the hor fun is strange - some parts hard and chewy, others mushy. Excellent chilli sauce - it packs a lot of punch, especially for a chilli coward like me.

This is the first time the chain has partnered hawkers to sell food.

"Singaporeans love our local food culture, it brings people together," she says. "We are doing our part to appreciate and recognise our hawkers."

Sales have been so encouraging that the chain is planning to run the programme again next year. It is scouting new hawker stalls and hawker dishes.

She says: "This means convincing hawkers to share their secret recipes with us, and us safeguarding the recipes.

GOING BEYOND HAWKER CENTRES

The meals might simply be a convenient option for customers, but the hawker brand owners say the tie-up is a way of extending their reach. And because the meals are halal, or made without pork and lard, there is potential to reach new audiences too.

Mr Ler Jie Wei, 37, whose great-great-grandfather started selling bak chor mee soup after coming here from China in 1923, says the collaboration is a way for him to find new revenue streams for Famous Eunos Bak Chor Mee.

"Ready-to-eat meals have been in demand since the pandemic hit," he says. "People are receptive to them. They like the convenience. And for us, it's a way to diversify."

He has three outlets - in Eunos and Hougang and at Ion Orchard. That stall is a joint venture with food service company Select Group.

The Covid-19 effect also prompted Mr Freddie Leong, 54, owner of Terry Katong Laksa, to work with 7-Eleven. His father Terry Leong, 90, started the business in 2004.

The younger Mr Leong runs a stall at Bukit Timah Market & Food Centre, and will be closing the other stall in Chinatown as his parents are getting on in years.

He says: "Business was affected and I spoke to my dad about how we really need to adapt. We have no choice."

For other brands, the collaboration is a way to flex their muscles.

The tie-up with 7-Eleven comes as Mr Aston Soon, 50, who grew his restaurant group from a coffee-shop stall, is looking expand his business by going into e-commerce and catering, among other platforms.

He spent more than $20 million building a five-storey food manufacturing plant in Senoko. It makes the food served in his restaurants, as well as food like pizza and pen cai for other companies.

"With the vast network that 7-Eleven has, we have more exposure," he says. "We want to show that ready-to-eat meals can be restaurant quality."

Mr Eric Ang, 43, third-generation owner of Jian Bo Shui Kueh, which started in 1958, had been working with the Singapore Polytechnic's Food Innovation and Resource Centre for two years when 7-Eleven came a-calling.

He had wanted to turn the brand's signature offerings into ready-to-eat format for Singapore and overseas markets such as Indonesia and China. He says that Indonesian travellers have, for years, been buying the steamed rice cakes and preserved radish topping to take home.

"The timing was right," he adds.

His 7-Eleven offerings are made in the company's central kitchen in Admiralty.

FROM WOK TO MICROWAVE

Some modifications have had to be made to get the food to 7-Eleven.

Terry Katong Laksa's Mr Leong says R&D showed prawns and cockles do not have a long shelf life, so his laksa at 7-Eleven comes with boiled egg, sliced fishcake and taupok.

For Famous Eunos, the bak in its 7-Eleven bak chor mee is minced chicken, not pork. Mr Ler created a new product just for the chain. He says he spent three months figuring out a recipe for chicken broth that would have the same depth of flavour as the pork version.

Likewise, Qiu Lian Ban Mee developed a chicken ban mian for 7-Eleven. Ms Ong Qiu Lian, 70, who started her business in 1988, worked with food service company Sats on the dish, including a new spicy and tangy sauce for the noodles.

The food in the programme is made by Select Group and Sats, which markets the offerings under its brand, The Travelling Spoon.

Jian Bo and Astons have their own manufacturing facilities and supply direct to 7-Eleven.

Mr Bong Chon Joon and Mr Chai Chin Tek, both 39, started Legend Scissors Cut Curry Rice in Yishun in 2020. Mr Bong says the chicken cutlet in their ready-to-eat meal is "not 100 per cent crispy". "There will be some difference," he says, adding that the curry gravy should mitigate the lack of crunch.

The stall, he adds, gets high volumes of orders on delivery platforms and this collaboration is a way to extend the brand's reach. "Society has changed. We store har kow, siew mai and char siew pau in the freezer for when we are too lazy to go out. They are easy to reheat. They are convenient."

hsueh@sph.com.sg

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