Papeda (Sago Starch Porridge with Yellow Fish Soup)

Variations

• A fish soup is the usual partner: kuah kuning, as here, is the most common. Whatever the soup, it carries all the salt and flavour; papeda itself tastes of almost nothing.
• With grilled fish as well: a charcoal-grilled fish (ikan bakar) and sambal are often served beside the kuah kuning.
• Without sago: tapioca starch treated the same way gives a similar glue, but without sago's smell. It is better thought of as a different food than a substitute.
• Leftovers: cooled, it sets into one mass that will no longer wind. Reheating does not bring back the stretch, so make only what will be eaten.

Tips

• The third state of a starch gel. Oyster omelette splits starch gels in one sentence — "Muk is starch and water boiled fully and set solid; this is that gel stopped halfway on purpose." Papeda is neither. It is cooked all the way until it is clear, and eaten before it sets. It is not cut with a knife or taken with a spoon; it is wound onto sticks.
• Cooked without a pan. On songpyeon, boiling water is poured onto rice flour so that "the starch that gelatinises does the job gluten would" — only part of the starch cooks, enough to hold a dough. Papeda uses the same move with four times the water, cooking all of it, so there is no dough left to knead, only glue. It only works if the water is truly boiling: pour on water that has cooled even a little and white patches stay behind, which is uncooked starch.
• The turn from white to clear grey is the sign it is done. Uncooked starch granules scatter light and look white; once they take up water and swell they go clear. So the colour alone shows you where it is still raw.
• Why slake it cold first. Boiling water poured onto dry flour cooks the outside of each clump at once into a skin, and the flour inside never meets the water. It is the same reason dotori-muk stirs its starch into cold water first.
• It is eaten the way fufu is. Fufu describes itself as "food you dip in soup and swallow rather than chew", and papeda goes down the same way. The soup is not a side dish but the whole of the seasoning, there too.
• And it will not wait either. Fufu warns: "Left to cool it stiffens to rubber, so nobody waits." With papeda that change happens on the table. Dotori-muk says that "once made it does not go in the fridge"; papeda does not even have the time to reach room temperature. That is why the order is fixed: make the soup first and the papeda last.
• The lime is for the sago's sourness. Sago starch is stored for months where it is made and ferments on its own, turning sour. The older the flour, the more a few drops of lime and the sour soup are there to cover it (balancing flavour).