Hubby, youngest boy and I have an hour to kill because my two other sons have sports practice at SXI. So we head over to Esplanade around 5.30 pm. As it was almost dinner time, I told him about the Mee Sotong. I found a stall, ate and found that it is not as good as what others mentioned. I found out later that I went to the wrong stall. Never mind, I will go back again tomorrow for lunch, as revenge.
There aren’t many stalls opened at that hour. However, this colourful jeruk or pickled fruits caught my eyes. OMG, look at those colourings! I bet you will get stomach cancer if you eat that often. The pickles sourish smell does make me salivate and the fruit inviting colours make me want to pop one into my mouth.
However, I do not want to die of rotting stomach so I didn’t touch those colourful pickles. I wonder if those people who pickled these fruits have any idea how safe are the colourings they use?
Some of these pickles are undeniably very tasty especially the mangoes. But I think these food producers should have some heart and not poison others to death with the kind of colourings and chemicals they use.
So, ladies, especially if you are pregnant or planning to conceive, please stay away from all these pickled fruits because they contain not only harmful colourings but other preservatives and sweeteners. Some of those sweeteners may cause deformities in fetuses. Remember that these pickled fruits look good, kills even faster.
4 thoughts on “Jeruk Penang (pickled fruits)”
The Real Mother Hen
(January 15, 2009 - 7:30 am)Being a Penangite but live far away from home, I’m glad to have found this site.
I used to like a kind of fruit, looks like a small mango, and the pronunciation sounds like “umputla”. It is often used in rojak, and it’s really good 🙂
Momo
(January 16, 2009 - 4:36 pm)Lilian, I see all the sour-sour stuff I already salivating! My mum used to say that if a person does not salivated when faced with all these sour stuff, it means that person is a leper! Hahaha .. I do not know how true that is!
Whatever it is, I shy away from eating the colorful ones. See also sked! I like to make my own jeruk eg. young papayas, ambras, young ginger,mangoes.
BTW Mother Hen, I think you are talking about the ‘ambra’. Malays called them buah kedongdong.Nowadays the juice of this fruit is very popular especially ‘ ambra suey boey’ drink.
When I get a lot of this fruit from a friend’s tree I would make my own jeruk.I just remove the skin, cut the fruits into quarters, then add as much sugar as I want (with a pinch of salt).No need to add vinegar. I leave the container in the fridge for a couple of days and they are ready to be eaten.Sometimes I can’t wait and start eating them the very next day.
Nowadays the ambras are from the dwarf type, where the tree is shorter and the fruits smaller. This means there are no fibrous seed to deal with and the whole fruit can be eaten.Tastes real good in rojak of course.
Xenobiologista
(January 18, 2009 - 9:17 am)Hi, this is my first visit to your blog – heard about it from the New York Times’ mention of Penang as one of the top 44 places to visit in 2009! Congratulations on being in one of the world’s biggest newspapers!
The way these artificial colourings are tested for safety is to feed huge quantities (about 1000X more than you would find in human food) of them to animals, usually lab rats (including pregnant rats) and see if the animals get sick or not and if the babies come out OK. I wouldn’t be worried about artificially coloured food here in the US actually, but I don’t know what the standards are back home in M’sia and if street vendors are required to follow standards vs. factories which make packaged foods.
Not saying that artificial colourings are “healthy”, but that they’re not “poison” either. Consuming artificially coloured food occasionally won’t hurt you.
Nan Ghazal
(February 8, 2009 - 10:24 am)I don’t know that they put artificial colourings in jeruk before this. Now I wonder why they put it. Jeruks is popular because of its taste not the colour.
Where do you get this infomation, from department of agro?
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