Nope, this one’s not a severely out-of-date April Fool’s joke. In fact, this neon-blue bird is part of a feast to welcome the Yuletide season at Bay Hotel Singapore’s Indonesian restaurant Rumah Rasa.
According to the press release, this mouth eye-watering dish was created in line with the hotel’s blue Christmas decoration this year, a questionable culinary aesthetic that is nonetheless attention-grabbing. As if the violently-blue tinge of the turkey ain’t sensational enough as it is, the bird will have stuffing made from cult-favorite instant noodles Indomie to pay homage to the restaurant’s Indonesian roots.
The result of a mad kitchen experiment by Rumah Rasa Executive Chef Esa, the tandoori turkey is braised in blue butterfly pea till tender before being roasted in the oven. As for how the stuffing is made, Indomie noodles are folded into bread, soaked in milk and tossed with Indonesian herbs and spices.
As out-there as the dish is (it is a hard task for restaurants to distinguish its Christmas feasts from the legion of competition eateries), picking blue as culinary hue might backfire. Blue is widely considered as an appetite-suppressing color — so much so that installing a blue light bulb in refrigerators can help discourage reaching in for the munchies. Blue food is a rare occurrence in nature, wrote color professor Jill Morton, attributing our inherent avoidance to our foraging ancestors who’d regard blue, purple and black as warning signs of potentially lethal food.
But then again, blue-colored dishes are no stranger to Southeast Asia — there’s the Malaysian nasi kerabu, which is rice cooked with butterfly-pea flowers and various herbs, for example. The usage of Indomie is a no-brainer too, as Rumah Rasa did go crazy with the noodles earlier this year with Indomie ‘nuggets’, gado gado and beef stroganoff.
Of course, the restaurant isn’t just serving blue turkey for their festive buffet — there’ll be the other twists on usual standards such as roast lamb leg with Javanese bekakak gravy, rendang cottage pie and more.
Rumah Rasa is at L1, Bay Hotel Singapore, 50 Telok Blangah Rd. Festive lunch buffets and festive dinner buffets (with a live barbecue station) available from Dec 21 till the end of the year.
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