Chai Buey

Chai Buey or also known as Kiam Chai Buey is a popular Chinese Hokkien dish. Often cooked during Chinese New Year. It is one of the most appetising Chinese food you will ever have eaten. Chai Buey if translated from the Hokkien dialect means leftover dishes.

So is this a vegetable stew or is it a vegetable soup some may ask? I would see this as more of a vegetable stew. During Chinese New Year, there will be a lot of leftover food. Chinese families will often pour all these into a pot and cook into what you see in the picture below.

The leftovers can range from vegetables (mushrooms, cabbage, etc), meat (roast pork, roast duck, roast chicken, port trotters) to seafood (abalone, prawns, squid,etc). It may sound disgusting to some, this mixture is the exact reason why this stew is special and tasty. Chinese pickled mustard, fresh Chinese mustard leaves are added together with tamarind juice and slices, dried chilli and pepper corns. It's very savoury, spicy & sour.

It takes quite a while to cook as you need to stew it and make sure all the ingredients are releasing and soaking up the flavours. It simple to cook though: Just throw in everything. For halal version, you can substitute the meat with halal ones.

Chai Buey Recipe :

Leftover meat (roast pig, barbeque pork, duck, chicken, or turkey)
6 dried red chilies (soaked with warm water and then cut into pieces)
4 pieces of Asam Gelugor (tamarind skins)
1 cup of tamarind juice
3 teaspoons of taucheo (fermented yellow bean sauce)
5 medium bowls of water
4 stalks of mustard green (cut into pieces)
Salt to taste

Method:

In a pot, bring the water to boil. Add the leftover meat and boil for 30 minutes. Add in the dried red chilies, dried tamarind slices, tamarind juice, taucheo (fermented yellow bean sauce), Chinese pickled mustard and fresh Chinese mustard green and simmer for another 45 minutes. Add salt to taste.

Voila. Serve hot with steamed white rice.