Footsteps - Jotaro's Travels: YummY! - Gulai Termenung Tok Piah Claypot (Dreamy Curry) @ Kuala Kedah

You are at - Jotaro's Blog / FootSteps / YummY! / Malay Food / Gulai Termenung Tok Piah Claypot (Dreamy Curry) @ Kuala Kedah

!YummY!

Jotaro's Food Review

Gulai Termenung Tok Piah Claypot (Dreamy Curry) @ Kuala Kedah

Seberang Kota, Kuala Kedah, Kedah, Malaysia - August 2018
On a short cycling tour from Perlis to Penang we visited the Kota Kuala Kedah Museum and the Kuala Kedah Fort . Both of these places are must visit destinations as they display and trace the history of the Kedah Sultanate. While there at Kuala Kedah, another must is to try the Gulai Termenung, a very good curry originating from this locality, it's so named as after trying it one will always dream about it. See, Gulai Termenung translates to "Dreamy Curry". We tried the one at Gulai Termenung Tok Piah.

This place also sells pretty good Nasi Melayu, with a wide range of Malay dishes. Apologies as I did not take close up photos of the dishes. Suffice to say, they served beef, chicken, lamb curries of different types; fried chicken/fish, and several stir-fried vegetables.

What drew us were also the ulam dishes (Malay green salad); being in a small town one will be able to find many Malay salad leaves that would normally not be found at the cities. These goes very well with their sambal belachan.

This dish may look like a wet mess, but it's one very good dish. This is the Kerabu Taugeh (Pickled mung bean sprouts), the boiled bean sprouts ins slightly pickled in a santan (coconut milk)-chili sauce. The pickling is just with a dash of lime so there's there's only a tinge of sourness. Added to the sauce is kerisik (dried fried coconut shavings) which gave a good creaminess flavour to the sauce, which together with the crunchy bean sprouts made this a very tasty dish. I appreciated this dish all the more as it is not often sold publicly.

And.... here comes the mainstay dish! What makes their curry different from other Gulai Termenung restuarants is that here its served in a clay-pot. And it came steaming hot with vapours wafting from the pot. In fact I had to wait a while for the steam wafting out from the pot before taking this photo. We had ordered the curry with Kembong fishes (Indian Mackerel).

The curry is thicker than Malacca's Assam Pedas, contains more spice and also a bit of santan (coconut milk). It's so good that we drank the curry like a soup.

Here we are enjoying our meal, eating with our hands the local kampong style.

The Kembong were super-fresh with firm and very sweet meat. For 8-10" medium size fishes they were also very cheap at RM1-00 each. Guess what? We loved the curry so much that all of us went for a second round!
Note: There are other fishes available on the menu, just ask for them.

Here I am with the lady herself, Tok Piah. Add a chef's hat and she looked just like her icon in their posters. Another favourite on their menu is freshly fried fishes.

For those who are keen to cook this gulai themselves, Tok Piah also sells her curry paste. The pre-packed "Pes Segars" (instant paste) can be bought at her shop or on-line through WhatsApp to this number: +6017-4247167 (Amirul).