While most Christmas meals focus on main dishes like roast chicken, Lim says he always goes for side dishes instead. — Photos: ART CHEN/The Star
When Lroy Lim goes for Christmas parties, he confesses that he always skips the main dish as most iterations fall short of his expectations.
“In keeping with the Christmas spirit, most people would look at the main dish as being the most important dish, but as a person who likes food, I generally avoid turkeys. Because for me, a lot of places don’t really do turkey well – they end up dry or tough. So most of the time, I skip it and go for the sides instead.
“The sides play a very important role because to me, meat alone is one-dimensional. Meat is meat. You can’t do a lot with it. You can spice it, you can marinate it, but it always ends up having around the same flavour profile. You don’t really do much with it.
“Whereas with the sides, you can play around with it more – you have a lot more options. You know, you can use potatoes, cabbage, brussel sprouts, corn – there’s a whole variety of options,” says Lim.
Lim is the executive chef of Ignis KL, a popular restaurant in Kuala Lumpur that highlights local ingredients using grilling and barbecuing as the main cooking mechanisms.
As a consequence of eschewing main dishes, Lim is fastidious about ensuring that Christmas side dishes are true stars in their own right.
Lim says home cooks have plenty of opportunities to play around with side dishes unlike mains like roast turkey which typically end up tasting the same.
His mashed potatoes for instance may look like, well, mashed potatoes but this is a dish in a league of its own.
The spuds are richly buttery, silken smooth and just glide down the gullet like velvet while the fried chicken skin scattered atop the dish adds a hedonistic, crunchy quality to the meal. It’s one of the best mashed potatoes you are likely to have tasted anywhere in the world and if you choose to make this at home, rest assured, fights will break out over who gets the last, dying bits.
“I’m French trained, so I think most French-trained chefs would know the recipe. It’s a classic from Joel Robuchon who is a three Michelin-starred chef. So the thing about this is, so far, it’s my favourite mash. If you ask me if I want mashed potatoes, the one mash that I think about is always this mash. This is my go-to. It’s very heavy, it’s very creamy and it’s very smooth.
“If you look at the recipe, it’s pretty much half potato, half butter and I added sour cream and fried chicken skin on top. So there are variations of it that you can do, but the concept is still the same. It has to be one part potato and one part fat of any sort to get this rich effect,” he says.
Lim’s grilled red cabbage in mulled wine is another intoxicating (quite literally) concoction that features cabbage that still has a firm crunch to it alongside a flavour profile that offers hints of smokiness and the spice-riddled festive flavours of mulled wine. It’s very, very good and incredibly easy to polish off.
“This is one of the first dishes I had when I was studying in Europe. So this is my version of the dish. I grilled the cabbage to give the vegetable a bit of char and smokiness and then it has a bit of sweetness from the glaze. And there is that rich wine flavour as well as the spices in it and I add a bit of parmesan cheese to give it a bit of saltiness,” he says.
Lim’s yule log is a modern take on the classic yule log and is a delightfully light sweet treat.
Even Lim’s yule log deviates from the norm. Instead of a traditional log cake, his version utilises tuille to mould a chocolate-coated crisp cylinder that is filled with a citrus based mousse and topped with candy cane bits, chocolate and crumble. It is light, not too sweet and the contrast between the crispness of the tuille and the softness of the filling offers so much holiday satisfaction.
“So, most yule logs that you find are cakes. And I am not a fan of cakes, but I like crispy stuff like chips. So this is a slightly modern version. But it can be as complicated or as simple as you want, because at the end of the day, what you put inside the log can be anything.
“You can put fruits, crushed Oreos – literally it’s open to whatever you want to do. The sky’s the limit,” he says.
MASHED POTATOES
250g Holland potatoes
50ml milk
200g cold butter, cut into cubes
salt and pepper to taste sour cream, as desired fried chicken skin, to garnish
Pre-heat oven to 120°C.
Boil the potatoes whole in salted water until soft. While the potatoes are hot, peel the skin and cut into medium sized chunks.
On a baking tray, place the potatoes and bake for 3 minutes. This is to dry out the potatoes.
While the potatoes are still hot from the oven, mash the potatoes with a masher or a fork in a bowl and pass through a sieve (don’t skip this part). Place the potato mash in a medium sized pot.
In a saucepan, heat up the milk till hot but before boiling point and mix half of the milk into the potato mash with a whisk.
In the same saucepan with the potato mash and milk, gradually add in cold butter cubes while mixing the mash over very low heat.
If the mashed potatoes start to split, add in spoonful of hot milk into the mix and whisk.
Once all the butter is mixed into the mash and well emulsified, season with salt and pepper.
Garnish with sour cream and fried chicken skin.
GRILLED RED CABBAGE
1 red cabbage
Cooking liquid
1 cinnamon stick
8 cloves
3 star anise
1 tsp black peppercorns
250g cranberry juice
250g red wine
250ml chicken stock
½ an orange, cut into slices
50g butter
75g brown sugar
30ml red wine vinegar
Glaze
1 cinnamon stick
2 star anise
5 cloves
1 tsp coriander seeds
250g cranberry juice
25g honey
25g store-bought strawberry jam
Garnish
50g crispy bacon bits
30g hazelnut, toasted and chopped
50g parmesan, shaved
Cut the red cabbage into wedges and stab the cabbage in parts. Rub salt into the cabbage. Leave it to cure for 1 hour before washing off the excess salt.
To make the cooking liquid, toast all the spices in a pan over medium heat until fragrant. Add in the remaining ingredients.
Increase the heat and bring the cooking liquid to boil, burn off the alcohol then lower the heat to a low simmer.
Add the red cabbage into the cooking liquid. Braise until the cabbage is soft, approximately 30 to 40 minutes and remove it from the liquid. Leave it to cool in a bowl.
Prepare the glaze by toasting the spices. Add the honey and cranberry juice. Reduce the glaze for a few minutes until it is syrupy then add in the strawberry jam. Set aside.
Pan-sear the bacon over medium heat until it is crispy and cut into small pieces.
Grill the cabbage over charcoal while brushing the glaze over it until it is charred or pan sear the cabbage in butter and glaze the cabbage after.
Serve with toasted hazelnuts, parmesan and crispy bacon bits over the cabbage.
