A-Pong

A-pong belongs to the family of bowl-cooked fermented-rice crepes that runs from the Tamil and Sri Lankan appam through the Malay apam to Phuket, carried into the island's mixed Chinese-Malay-Thai street culture. The name echoes appam, and the technique is the same: a thin fermented batter cooked in a small curved pan that gives crisp lacy edges and a soft centre. On Phuket it is a long-standing charcoal-cooked street snack — the best-known stall in Old Town has been turning out the crepes for decades — and is eaten plain as a teatime or after-meal sweet rather than, as in South India, with a savoury stew.

You start at the brittle edge, which shatters like spun sugar and tastes faintly of caramel and toasted coconut, with a clean meringue snap. Working inward the crepe thickens and softens until the very centre is barely set — warm, custardy, almost runny — sweet and rich with coconut and carrying a gentle sourness from the ferment. Rolled up, one a-pong is two textures in a single bite, crackle giving way to cream. It has to be eaten hot and soon; cooled, the lace goes limp and the whole thing turns uniformly soft and loses its point.

The lace rim is a heat gradient written into a curved pan. Batter swirled thin up the hot sides is mostly water and sugar in a fine film; there it dries and the sugars caramelise fast into a brittle, almost meringue-like crisp, while the deeper pool at the base — thicker, more batter and coconut — only gels into a soft custard before it can dry out. The same crepe is therefore crisp at the edge and tender at the centre from one cooking, exactly as in appam. Fermenting the batter for hours is what builds that structure and flavour: yeast or wild ferment raises gas bubbles that open the texture and lighten the lace, and produces the faint sour tang that offsets the sugar — modern cooks use baker's yeast where toddy once did the work. A charcoal fire gives the uneven, radiant bottom heat that crisps the rim without scorching, and the lid traps steam to set the middle.