The Wok & Barrel will be at 13 Duxton Hill

After 4 months of searching and seeing countless units in the east, north east and Tanjong Pagar, we finally found the perfect space for The Wok & Barrel!

There will be renovations and I hope we will be able to open The Wok & Barrel in June.

To celebrate, I went home and cooked myself a lovely fish curry for dinner as well as experimented with baking my own ciabatta. I loved getting my hands dirty with the flour and shaping the ciabatta loaves. These ciabatta loaves will be great for The Wok & Barrel Crispy Pork Sandwiches and Crispy Chicken Sandwiches. That means everything will be handmade by me.....right down to the mayonnaise that will be accompanying the sandwich.

Home made ciabatta for Crispy Pork Sandwiches and Crispy Chicken Sandwiches

I've also been working on the bistro menu for The Wok & Barrel and got the chance to serve Porchetta to my friends during D & AW's birthday celebration.

I wanted to kick up the flavour profile of the Porchetta so I used a satay marinade instead of the usual salt and 5 Spice seasoning. It was delicious and transformed an otherwise good dish into something quite sublime. Juicy tender pork belly with a crispy crackling.

Satay Porchetta

I also managed to serve them a dessert called Shendol Delights which was inspired by our local dessert Chendol. It is a deconstructed Chendol with a rich coconut pannacotta drizzled with gula melaka syrup and topped with home made red bean ice cream.

Coconut Pannacotta

Shendol Delights

French Toast for The Wok and Barrel

I took a long break but I am backkkkkkkkkk!

The Wok and Barrel is taking a longer time than I expected but it is actually giving me more time to work out the various menu items that I would like to put on the menu. Of course all fans of Madam Tan's Nasi Lemak will still get to enjoy my rich yummy Nasi Lemak rice together with my side dishes like Beef Rendang, Curry Chicken, 5 Spice Roast Pork, Otak Otak and Fish Curry but I will be adding some new dishes to my all day weekend brunch menu.

I have always loved the crispy french toast from Hong Kong, so today I set about getting the lovely crispy batter right. First I made some home made peanut butter, chunky peanut butter with no additives.


Homemade Chunky Peanut Butter


Then I set about making up the batter - a light eggy crispy batter that would hold the 2 slices of sandwich bread together.

Crispy Eggy Batter

For the purpose of this trial, I decided to use ordinary sandwich white bread but for The Wok and Barrel, I will be using an enriched white bread sliced thickly which I will stuff with bananas, nutella and peanut butter. Or any other stuffings that you may want - mango, peaches, pinepple? Tell me what you would like to have in your french toast.

Ok, coming back to the trial, I spread thickly on 1 slice of bread, rich chocolatey Nutella, and on the other, the homemade peanut butter. I dipped the nutella and peanut butter sandwich in the batter, and dropped it into the hot oil. After a minute of frying, I fished out the browned french toast and dusted icing sugar onto the hot fried bread.

French Toast with Nutella and Peanut Butter



French Toast at The Wok and Barrel

 The resulting French Toast is piping hot with molten nutella and peanut butter and perfect for brunch. I can't wait to start serving it to you!