TacoCat's TrEats #205: Happiness in a Bowl 🍜

Hey Hive!

We're back with more of our hawker adventures! It's been a while but one of the things we do on dates is trying out different stalls in different hawker centers to find which are our favourites!

If you've never patronised a hawker center before, they are typically non-air conditioned buildings that house all kinds of food stalls specialising in one or two signature dishes. They're ubiquitous here in Singapore and Malaysia and are known for delicious and affordable food - the perfect combination! They're definitely where you can find the best food in Singapore and is our go-to place for food!

Source: wanderlustyle

It's been a while since I shared about our neighbourhood hawker centres, which are actually our go-to spots for quick meals if we don't have the time or energy to cook.

The one we always visit is called Kampung Admiralty since it's just a short walk away and its actually housed within a complex with various shops, restaurants and has a 24 hour supermarket in the basement level! It's really convenient and our routine is to go order some takeaway food, buy some groceries and then head back home to eat.

There are quite many stalls in the hawker centre here and we recently discovered a really good one called Jia Le Yong Tau Foo!

If you're unfamiliar, Yong tau foo is a Hakka Chinese dish consisting primarily of tofu filled with ground meat mixture or fish paste. Variations of this dish feature vegetables and mushrooms stuffed with ground meat or fish paste, as well as different meat balls. Yong tau foo is eaten in numerous ways, either dry with a sauce or served as a soup dish with noodles or rice.

Source: istock

So a typical yong tau foo stall would have a display of all the ingredients in front for patrons to choose what they wanted, and the price would be determined based on how many ingredients you picked, as well as any other add-ons you chose. The ingredients would then be either boiled in a broth or deep fried and served along with noodles or rice.

Source: Her World

But this stall in particular does this differently, which I've actually never seen before. They had specific sets of bowls with various ingredients and some even had different soup bases.

I've never heard of Jia Le Yong Tau Foo before but apparently it's pretty famous, or at least famous enough to be featured on our local food column and TV show called Makansutra, and even our previous Prime Minister has eaten it and gave it a thumbs-up, so it must be pretty good!

We bought two different bowls to try, one soup and one dry just to see how it would taste. After ordering, they prepared our bowls on the spot so it'll be hot and fresh. We were bringing it back home to eat though so we tried to hurry back to enjoy it.

Sean chose the Fried Yuan Yang Yong Tau Foo which comes with various fried ingredients, while I chose the Happiness Bowl. It was a little warm for soup at the time but I wanted to see how good their soup was. For carbs we ordered rice and kway teow so we had a variety.

The soup looked average but was actually quite flavourful yet light. It was a nice light broth and although it was mixed with all the fish paste ingredients it didn't reek of fish at all. It was a nice light tasting yet hearty soup that I ended up finishing the whole bowl.

The fried yong tau foo was definitely interesting to say the least. Normally you would order the ingredients and have them fry it for you so this was a complete surprise since they're ingredients you don't normally see. There were these huge fried balls of fish paste wrapped in eggplant and other vegetables like bittergourd as well.

It was such a shock to see how big the fried fish paste ball was! You don't see the fried ones being that huge. But it was crispy on the outside, chewy and bouncy on the inside, and still quite juicy. It was really tasty!

The soup had various types of yong tau foo with fish paste wrapped in beancurd skin. I'm pretty sure it's all the same fish paste just wrapped or contained in different vegetables and coverings. But they all tasted really good and fit together well. Even the chili-wrapped one was also surprisingly good and not spicy at all.

Overall, we thought this meal was really good and satisfying, and we've ordered from them multiple times since then. Although we have a good yong tau foo stall just downstairs from our house it's good to try different ones now and then and this one was definitely a winner.

I'm not sure if they have other outlets but if you happen to come across Jia Le Yong Tau Foo, definitely give it a try!

Thanks for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

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Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat's TrEats #204: Getting Healthy Hotpot at Shabu-GO! 🍲