If you’re after health food, a fishy assam laksa is probably a better bet, and seasoned according to whim: Yin, Musa and Tan all add sugar as well as salt and pepper, but taste it and see what works for you.

View image in fullscreen ‘The cook responsible for my first laksa’: Sylvia Tan uses dried shrimp, soaked first, in her noodle soup. I have never frozen it myself but I don't see any ingredient in paste that can be issue in freezing. The Chilli Paste is made with more than just chilli and I’ve never come across a recipe for it so I made my own up. Fusing together Chinese and Malay heritage, Nyonya women transformed traditional Chinese dishes with local spices and ingredients, creating a new hybrid cuisine.Laksa is a spicy noodle soup from Malaysia, also found in other South East Asian counties including Singapore and Indonesia. Laksa paste generally contains dried chilies, shallots, turmeric, lemongrass, tamarind, galangal and shrimp paste. Lee says the only two mandatory toppings are prawns, which are “important for flavouring the broth”, and tofu, “to suck it up”. Also, lemongrass paste, which is often used to avoid hard stems of lemongrass in soups/curries, is not that easy to find either.

Remove the chillies and dried shrimp from the water (it doesn’t matter if you don’t drain them completely as some water is fine). Sometimes I make the laksa paste in the evening and leave it covered in the fridge overnight as this further intensifies all of the wonderful ingredients and cook the laksa the following day. Alternatively, udon noodles can be a modern day "cheat" in place of traditional thick laksa noodles.

Laksa originated from the Peranakan people, which refers to people who are of mixed Chinese-Malay/Indonesian heritage. Note: packaged laksa paste contains palm oil and saturated fats, which is why the paste appears to be much more red and oilier than this homemade version. be Video can't be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: My Mom's Malaysian Sarawak Laksa with Homemade Laksa Paste (https://www.