Traditional Recipe: Homemade Malaysian Kaya

Hello, friends! We know you’re all big fans of Penang and Malaysian food. So this week Jeremy is sharing a traditional Malaysian recipe for homemade Kaya that he learned from a friend. This popular breakfast food in George Town and other parts of Malaysia is a delicious and simple snack you can make right at home.

Kopitiam and Roti Kaya

Who isn’t searching for a little extra comfort and indulgence these days? Go ahead--put a little extra kaya and butter on your toast—we’re not going to stop you. And if you haven’t tried kaya, you should fix that--because if comfort and indulgence were a spreadable condiment, it would probably be a rich, creamy, coconutty jam, rounded out with the fragrance of pandan leaves.

“Kaya” is a Malay word for “rich”, and that’s no misnomer for this ambrosial jam you’ll find in any old school Malaysian coffee shop worth its roti. A lazy Wikipedia search tells us that kaya’s origins are uncertain (like many regional food folklores), and that it was probably adapted from the traditional Portuguese sweetened egg cream that arrived with the aforementioned colonials. Like most foodstuffs that have made their way into the peninsula’s kitchens, there now are countless delicious variations, including pandan-green Nyonya kaya, the dark and sweet caramel-finished versions in many Hainanese kopitiam, and we’ve even spotted durian-infused kaya in Ipoh markets—but we’re not getting into that controversy right now; that’s for some other exciting post. And another great thing about kaya? It’s relatively simple to make at home, if a little time consuming—but let’s just say we’ve got a surplus of time on our hands, lately.

You’ll soon have a delicious jar of this golden, creamy kaya in your kitchen

From Toast to Toh Soon Penang

Before we get to this simple recipe, a confession: I hate toast. Growing up, few things epitomized 20th century breakfast banality like slathering a piece of pre-sliced bagged bread with butter (or margarine, or I can’t Believe It’s Not Margarine) and some high-fructose corn syrup disguised as fruit jam. The visceral disappointment of biting into something akin to damp sweetened sandpaper glued to a kitchen sponge, has never left me. When I grew into the annoying gourmand that I am now, I swore off bagged breads, jars of jam, and the whole toast format all together. Give me a flaky kouign amman pastry from Bretagne, a Sicilian brioche con gelato (yes, and ice cream sandwich--now that is how you breakfast, mi amici), or an er kuai (a chewy Yunnanese rice flour crepe, often rolled around a kruller and nutella). But toast? Why even get out of bed?

And then I popped into one of Penang’s famous street food institutions, Toh Soon—that narrow alleyway crammed with fully-occupied plastic tables and chairs, and servers darting to-and-from a large kettle drum functioning as a wood-fired toaster/hot water tank for tea and thick black kopi. At Toh Soon, I had my first taste of Penang roti bakar—grilled, buttered toast with dark brown kaya, as well as roti stim, basically a fluffy, steamed kaya-sandwich, sliced and dunked in a beaten mug of ½ boiled eggs seasoned with white pepper and soy sauce.

Back when people ran towards lines, Toh Soon tended to get some pretty long ones

It finally hit me (as it often does)--I needed to stop being so pretentious and embrace these simple joys from simple foods in life. And none of these products were exactly artisanal—or were they? Bengali bread from the bakery across town, perhaps kampung (village/free-range) eggs, and a generous dollop of sweet and imperfectly grainy coconut-egg jam—the trademarks of a condiment made in smaller batches and not crammed with artificial sweeteners, stabilizers, and other “enhancing” additives. It’s this same sublime simplicity I’ve been missing now more than ever, more than a Parisian croissant, or a—okay, maybe not more than a Sicilian gelato sandwich...I mean, seriously.

But as I was sitting in a house, under the second phase of Malaysia’s pandemic lockdown, I dug up a recipe my friend Howie’s mom shared with me, during my first trip to Ipoh. It’s beautifully simple recipe, which I always tinker with--sugar can be added to taste; I usually infuse my coconut milk with knotted or scraped pandan leaves if there’s a pandan tree (or even frozen leaves) nearby, and I have occasionally added caramel to the mix right before the eggs thicken too much. Replacing some of the whole eggs with the same volume of kampung eggs, egg yolks, duck eggs—you can get all kinds of decadent textures--but again, it’s all a matter of preference! You want simplicity? Just follow these ratios.

Traditional Homemade Kaya Recipe

• 1 bowl of eggs

• 1 bowl of sugar

• ½ bowl of coconut milk (you can infuse with a few scraped or knotted pandan leaves over low heat, if you want—let it return to room temp and then remove the leaves before you combine the coconut milk with the eggs

Steps

1. Beat eggs and sugar together, and strain into another bowl. This is important! If you’re lazy like me and forget to strain, the texture will not be as creamy.

2. Pour strained eggs & sugar into bowl of a double-boiling set up (a metal bowl that fits above a sauce pan 2/3 full of simmering water will work), and pour in your coconut milk (pandan-infused, or not).

3. Whisk slowly over simmering heat.

4. Whisk slowly over simmering heat

5. Whisk slowly over simmering heat. And I cannot stress this enough…

6. Whisk slowly over simmering heat

(You get the idea. It really is worth the effort to whisk slowly until it thickens and becomes creamy and homogenous—it could take an hour, it could take 2 hours. You could really mess up, and curdle your eggs in ½ hour. Ahem. In that case, chuck the whole thing into a blender and slowly pulse until it gets creamy. And yes, whisk slowly over simmering heat.)

When it thickens to desired consistency, let cool. Kaya should last in the refrigerator for 2-3 weeks.

Don’t forget to have your vessel of choice--toast, croissant (thank you for this mind blowing idea, Thong Kee Coffee Shop), some blue and white pulut (sticky rice), or just a spoon ready, because you’re day is probably about to get at least a little better.

Seriously, it’s delicious on toasted bread but have you had it on a croissant?!

Speaking of breakfast, why not try some of the best dim sum in Kuala Lumpur for second breakfast?