Good Food Hunting In Ipoh, Part 3

"The night wasn't over yet as we just had to get a bite of another delight that is only available at night and it was after all, our one and only last night in Ipoh that night!" - Last paragraph from Part 2

Now, this delight is one of the highlights of the Ipoh trip when all four of us unanimously agreed that it was a great delicious find! It's so good that I am going to just write this one item in Part 3 of my "Good Food Hunting In Ipoh". With a tip from Jason of Ipoh Mali Talak Sombong, we headed of to Pusat Makanan Man U at Jalan Raja Ekram for the last food stop of the night.

We came here to look for this stall...

Mr Wong and his two sons (occasionally) runs the popiah (fresh spring roll) stall. His two sons are such nice boys - they were so proud and happy to see me take pics of them, the stall and the food! :o) Mr Wong himself is also friendly and nice.

A paragraph from the wikipedia describes popiah as this : -

A popiah "skin" is a thin paper-like crepe or pancake made from wheat flour (rice flour is sometimes used) which is covered with a sweet sauce (often a bean sauce, a blended soy sauce or hoisin sauce or a shrimp paste sauce (hae-ko, POJ: hê-ko)), and optionally with hot chilli sauce before it is filled. The filling is mainly finely grated and steamed or stir-fried turnip, jicama (known locally as bangkuang), which has been cooked with a combination of other ingredients such as bean sprouts, French beans, and lettuce leaves, depending on the individual vendor, along with grated carrots, slices of Chinese sausage, thinly sliced fried tofu, chopped peanuts or peanut powder, fried shallots, and shredded omelette. Some hawkers, especially in non-halal settings, will add fried pork lard. As a fresh spring roll, the popiah skin itself is not fried.

Well, what's special about this stall is that Mr Wong does both the normal wheat flour skin and also an egg skin variety which Jason told me that it's a must for me to try it out.

Egg skin for the fresh spring roll

I love popiah and enjoy rolling up a few of these during popiah parties, the hard part is the slicing, dicing, grating, shredding, julienne-ing the ingredients ;o) The normal popiah skin are easily available from the market. Well...the rest of the steps are easy after that.

Slather on the sweet "hoisin" sauce/chilli sauce...

Then place bits of the ingredients layer by layer

Then just roll it up (tucking the sides in first) as neatly as you can. Mr Wong does a very good job at ensuring that enough ingredients goes into it to make it yummy roll but at the same time making sure that it's not overloaded else the popiah would literally fall apart when it's being rolled and/or cut. At RM1.70/USD0.50 a roll, this popiah packs a punch. Its aromatic egg skin and the mix of the flavourful ingredients was an ensemble that ended our night on a sweet note.

Popiah Stall at Man U Food Court (Pusat Makanan Man U)
Jalan Raja Ekram
Daily from 8 pm - 12 midnight
Call Mr Wong to check (just in case) - 016-5395969


To Be Continued...