Patrick looking for bananas to harvest

Patrick Tse had been told that the goreng pisang stall was famous in Johor, so he popped by to get a few. He then dumped them at the back of his car and drove back to Singapore, but he got caught in a traffic jam and only made it home two hours later. When he finally took one out and sunk his teeth into it, the banana was, to his surprise, still crispy.

Goreng Pisang, or Pisang Goreng as it is known in Malaysia and Indonesia, is a deep-fried battered banana eaten as a snack. Before the 80s, it was mainly sold at the Malay hawker stalls. The original recipe simply constituted of rice flour, salt, water, and “kapo” – a type of white powder used to oxidise the batter. The final crust is crunchy like a cracker but turns soggy almost immediately in a humid weather.

Over the years, more Chinese hawkers joined the rank of goreng pisang sellers, the most famous being Lim Kim Yong, who used to have a stall at Orchard Road’s Gluttons Square. He and the other newcomers offered lighter, crispier goreng pisangs that shatter like glass when you bite into them. The improvised version became very popular, but short-lived. Today, customers demand for higher standards. “A good goreng pisang must meet three requirements. It must be crispy, it must not be oily, and most importantly, it must be crispy even after it turns cold,” said Patrick.

Patrick has been selling goreng pisang for exactly 30 years. I chanced upon his stall at Clementi Hawker Centre about a month ago and he agreed to walk me through his life as a goreng pisang hawker. At first his pisang were largely similar to the traditional ones. But he began to tweak his recipe as more people were asking for the crispier version. In 2000, he travelled to Malaysia and Indonesia in search for a better recipe but found that most of them followed the traditional method of cooking, until he ate the one at Johor. Impressed by the crispiness of the fried bananas, Patrick returned to meet the stall owner and paid him 20,000 ringgit for his recipe. After watching how he made the bananas, Patrick was convinced, and perhaps somewhat relief, that he could not have thought of the composition and techniques by sheer trial and error. After returning to Singapore, he continued experimenting with his new found, or rather, paid knowledge, and added his own touch to it. “Now I can recreate his batter, but he can’t recreate mine,” said Patrick.

The success of his batter was validated when renowned chef, Sam Leong, asked him for the ready-made paste to make the desserts at his restaurant. Patrick is very protective of his recipe, and would only tell me that it consists of six ingredients and involves some baking techniques. He only prepares the batter when he has the privacy, which he finds at his banana plantation in Lim Chu Kang. Away from the city at northern part of Singapore, Patrick grows about 2000 banana trees in a 1600 square metre plot of land. Four to five years ago, the bananas that came from Malaysia were, let’s just say, disappointing. Some said it was the changing climate, some attributed it to a virus, but they never found what was the cause.

Over the next few years, the supply of good bananas became very irregular. Three years ago, Patrick decided to set up his own plantation to make up for the declining supply. Now, the bananas he grows are 30 per cent of what he needs at his stall. I followed him to his plantation to check out the crops. Among the different types of bananas, he said, the red-flesh Pisang Rajah makes the best goreng pisang. They are small, sweet, and fragrant. But there’s one problem – few farmers grow them these days. Pisang Rajah takes a longer time to grow than the other species – a year for a baby plant to grow and bear fruits and another three months to ripe. Plantation owners prefer to cultivate something with a shorter turnaround.

To Patrick, growing bananas is as easy as eating it, so he unconsciously made a mockery of my question about how bananas are reproduced. “Okay if you got study, you will know that bananas reproduces by sucker.” Eh… I think it was taught in primary schools but I wasn’t paying attention. For you readers who may be as ignorant as I am, here is the process that Patrick painstakingly explained to me: a tree only produces one bunch of bananas, about 120 of them, after which it will be chopped off and left to decompose, acting as a fertiliser for the soil. A young shoot will then grow from the stem of the decapitated plant, reproducing a new plant.

Bananas ripe gradually, from the top to the bottom of the bunch. Once the top ones start to turn yellow, Patrick will chop it off the tree and hang it in the storeroom until the rest of the bunch mature. If the bananas were left to ripe on the tree, the top ones would be past its best by the time the rest were good to eat. Besides, Patrick must harvest the bananas before the birds can get to them. Birds are the banana farmers’ greatest enemy. They dig their beaks into the flesh and render the fruit unsuitable for human consumption. Even the gunnysack that is used to protect the bananas from an over-exposure of sunlight, which will cause the fruit to harden, can’t keep the birds away.

Bananas on the same bunch ripe evenly this way

But the fowls’ fondness of the bananas is a testament to their good taste. “Animals only pick the best to eat you know,” Patrick said proudly. When the stall needs an urgent supply of bananas, Patrick would harvest the green ones too. He then gives them a special treatment to hasten the ripening. Behind the storeroom there’s a small cabinet with some burning joss sticks. “I’m not praying ah,” Patrick explained. He was creating a “sauna” condition that will help the bananas ripe quickly. The enclosed environment also contained the ethylene gas that the bananas released to help themselves ripen. So much hard work goes into one goreng pisang, no wonder Patrick sells as many as 500 a day, and his stall is considered one of the best in Singapore. Like what he said, his fried banana fritters are crispy, not oily, and crispy even after they turned cold. But there’s one thing he left out – they are grown here in Singapore.