Last weekends I attended an event organized by Open Rice at Grand Millennium Hotel’s Lai Ching Yuen thanks to the invitation from Marcky, a friend who is associated with the project, and someone who definitely loves to eat.
chef Kong of Lai Cheng Yuen showing off his skills
Lai Cheng Yuen is famous for it’s dimsum, and our host was the very friendly Chef Kong, a dimsum chef 28 years. Some of chef Kong’s signature dishes are the steamed siew mai with fresh scallop, deep fried bean curt roll with prawns, and mini durian tart.
On that day, however, we were in a treat for something different. Dimsum is usually associated wit seafood and pork as main ingredients, but Chef Kong wanted to show us that you can make yummy dimsum using all vegetarian ingredients too.
we got to try our hands on making dimsum
Even better, right after the cooking demonstration, we got to get our hands dirty and make our own dimsum as well.
The good chef prepared the all important dimsum skin from scratch (they do this everyday at Lai Ching Yuen) using Hong Kong flour as the main ingredient. The filling of the dimsum was prepared from the combination of carrot, mushroom, sengkuang, celery, bokchoi, and more.
these are all vegetarian dimsums
After the cooking demo, we were served 5 different vegetarian dim sum dishes chef Kong prepared on the spot. These were the pan fried soft bun with mixed vegetable, deep fried yam ring with mixed fruits, vegetarian lot mai fan, chee cheong fun, and a transparent sort of sui kao.
vegetarian chee cheong fun, lor mai fan, and the last 2 pieces, we made
The dishes were pretty good, and I suppose as close as you can get to tasting like real dim sum without any hint of meat or seafood ingredients. This is perfect for vegetarians who prefer real vegetarian foods instead of those menu that’s filled with fake meat & fake seafood that is popular in Chinese vegetarian offerings (always irks me especially for those who do it for religious purposes).
the five dimsum dishes we sampled
Unfortunately we did not get to try dim sum from Lai Ching Yuen’s normal menu, but judging from chef Kong’s expertise in this demonstration, I am pretty sure that they won’t disappoint.
At the end of the event, I won a lucky draw – lunch buffet for two at The Mill, Grand Millennium, and Horng walked away with a handsome voucher of RM 800+ from Slimming Sanctuary. Yuki should be happy about it. 😀
Address:
Lai Ching Yuen
160 Jalan Bukit Bintang
55100 Kuala Lumpur
GPS: 3.14791, 101.71222
Tel: 03-2117 4180