This is a real Malaysian breakfast: soft boiled eggs broken into a small bowl with white pepper and soy sauce and a kopitiam, a drink. The toast is a thick home made style bread toast with no crusts and a heavy slathering of margarine. The kaya toast if you feel like celebrating with something sweet is the same thick toast with a generous slathering of butter and a layer of kaya. The toast is then dipped in the egg and the remainder egg eaten with a teaspoon.
It must take great care and precision to produce a precisely soft boil egg for every order. They would have to use timer and a staff member whose job is to only to hang around these eggs. One day, I spotted a yellow tower at a cafe with no burners. It looked like something one would put in a microwave but it looked too tall to fit. I saw eggs in them once. I also saw the customers having our typical breakfast. I put two together and realised the yellow tower made those eggs, but I didn't understand how and specifically how this cafe with no kitchen could produce this.
I finally asked, they confirmed my suspicion, but I still didn't understand how that yellow tower produced soft boiled eggs. I stumbled across the device on the net and found it was this:
It is a soft boiled egg cooker invented by a Malaysian. Typical for a Malaysian invention made in his kitchen in a terrace house in the middle of Cheras. (I am imagining this) It is made with the cheapest materials to make the device most affordable. It is utterly simple in its design and lacks the strong 'designed by a marketing advertising executive' who would have loaded it with accessories and weight to deserve its place in the middle class kitchens of the world. What happened to simplicity?
The most important part of this device is the valve, the only piece of non plastic. This is his story as said in the Star newspaper.
- How did it happen? Back in the days when Datuk Hew Ah Kow was just a lad working as a bulldozer operator in the jungles of Kelantan in 1973, there was little time to keep count of the minutes.thestar.com.my
“There were about 20 of us in a lumber camp who liked nothing better than to start the day with half-boiled eggs. The problem was, we always lost track of time, carried away with things like checking the engines and refuelling. So, by the time we got back to our eggs, they were always overcooked,” recalls Hew.
“Young and full of bravado, I took it as a challenge and began to conduct my own experiments, puncturing the bottoms of Ovaltine cans with a nail and filling them with eggs and hot water,” says Hew.
It took a year before Hew found the correct ratio of water to eggs. As he drew closer to a solution, Hew’s tests made him go off eggs. It also affected his colleagues who had to help eat his experiments. - The effort eventually paid off when one day, a direct-selling stockist rode his Honda Cub into Hew’s work camp and got marooned by the rain, forcing an overnight stay. At breakfast, he got to sample the most perfect half-boiled eggs he had ever tasted.
“It was the camp cook who pointed me out. At first, he came to me and asked if I could give him one of my Ovaltine cans to take home. I said ‘No way.’ Then he asked if I could sell him the prototype so I said, ‘Fine, let me see the money first.’ He returned and gave me RM7,000,” recalls Hew.
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