when you visit kuching, you must try this local dish - midin. i have blogged about this dish before. the crunchy vegetable is actually a forest fern. my friends tell me that it can even be found growing by the roadside. midin actually grows wild in swampy and forested areas in sarawak. it seems the pucuk paku that you can get in west malaysia comes from a different variety of ferns.
midin has curly fronds and it is very crunchy even after it has been cooked. the natives have always considered the fern a tasty, nutritious vegetable and the jungle fern’s rise from rural staple to urban gourmet green occurred in the 1980s with the increased urban migration of the iban, orang ulu and other groups.
we bought two bundles at rm$2 each from the satok weekend market. we were to find out that the midin was not as crunchy as those that we had eaten at restaurants. according to my friend, it was because the harvested midin had been left around for more than two days. midin stays fresh up to two days after harvesting.
midin is enjoyed by all and most restaurants in kuching have the curly fronds on their menu, often stir-fried with sambal belacan. it can also be cooked in two other ways. i prefer it stir-fried with ikan bilis, onions and calamansi; i like the tangy taste. the other way is to stir-fry it with red rice wine. only the tender part of the fronds is used for cooking.
9 comments:
So this is how it looks before cooking! Indeed it's a must-try local dish.
I find the taste so-so. But still whenever I go to S'wak, I would eat this simply becos elsewhere you can't get it.
Did you try the giant river prawn?
Hey, I see that they pack it in the leaves of the simpoh air.
yu-kym, they pinch off the fibrous part, near the bottom. some people also remove the leaves.
chun see, i saw the giant river prawns being sold at the weekend market but i have not tried them. ya, i also did not realise that the ferns were wrapped with simpoh air leaves.
After watching Okto Dining with Death this plant is poisonous if not prepared by expert hands.
Hi, just bloghopping and learnt lots of stuff regarding greenery through your blog
Cheers to us bloggers :)
Fried Midin with sambal belacan. Yummy. Love Mani Chai fried with egg too. Ate these two dishes when I was in Miri. Just wondering why Mani Chai is poisonous and is not allowed for sale here when the dish is a delicacy in Malaysia.
This is a dangerous vegetable called paku pakis, which is a cancer causing plant. It's very poisonous and no insects eat this plant. This plant causes stomach cancer. Sarawak has one of the highest rate of stomach cancer due to eating this midin fern or paku pakis.
Ptaquiloside is a norsesquiterpene glucoside produced by bracken ferns (majorly Pteridium aquilinum) during metabolism. It is identified to be the main carcinogen of the ferns and to be responsible for their biological effects, such as haemorrhagic disease and bright blindness in livestock and oesophageal, gastric cancer in humans. Ptaquiloside has unstable chemical structure and acts as a DNA alkylating agent under physiological conditions. It was first isolated and characterized by Yamada and co-workers in 1983.[2][3] The pure form ptaquiloside is a colorless amorphous compound. It is readily soluble in water and fairly soluble in ethyl acetate. Except in the plants, ptaquiloside has been detected in the milk and meat of affected livestock, as well as in the underground water and dry soil around bracken fern vegetation.[4][5][6] The prevalence of ptaquiloside in daily sources along with its carcinogenic effects make it an increasing biological hazard in modern days.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptaquiloside
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