A home chef’s mission to make Malay cuisine deliciously vegan

Schira Hassan admits she has always had a fondness for food. She even confesses that a meal surrounds the heart of many of her relationships. It is this affinity for food that cemented what she wants out of life, therefore she made creating dishes a big part of her life in her job as a chef.

“I also learnt from my Mak (mum) that we can eat well and that good food should belong to everyone,” she recalls. “When you don’t have much growing up, you have to find all these other things to give you joy and to be creative. While we never felt rich in money, we were always rich in food.”

Schira reveals that she has always expressed her love through food and going on her “purposeful”  journey as a chef has been “a way for me to create an unapologetic love letter to the inner child in me”. 

“I think that determination was based around becoming a mother too,” she adds. “I love my time being a domestic engineer; I have never thought of feminism as about rejecting the traditional roles but more the opportunity to choose one’s role. And now that I’m here, I love it.”

Celebrating and pushing tradition through food 

The 37-year-old runs Suri by Schira Hassan, which specialises in vegan Malay and Indonesian dishes. She reveals that she turned vegan “one day at a time” since 2019 and didn’t think about how she would never eat certain foods again. In 2020, she launched her home-based catering business with the aim to cook ingredient-forward traditional vegan Malay dishes “expressing who I am as a Malay-Singaporean woman”.

“Malay food is so charged, particularly when it comes to a Malay person cooking that food,” she shares. “We have this past, we have this history and here is where we’re going. It’s a forward-moving conversation. 

“This is an important part of our heritage; we should have a sense of pride with native ingredients, we should know what they taste like. Because the connection to your roots is really one of the most important things of all,” she adds.

Schira describes herself as a cook who is looking backwards in order to look forward. She is not interested in serving up “Malay food doused in oil and meat” as she believes that isn’t the best that the cuisine has to offer. 

“Suri’s menu embodies the kind of bridge, celebrating tradition and pushing it too,” she explains. “You have rice dishes that have very humble beginnings and you innovate it with something unconventional. 

“It was really this morph of something Malay into something that is niche. And what really melds them together is just a good old Sambal Belachan,” she adds. “It’s Schira as a little girl on the plate, and it’s also Schira as a grown culinary force on the plate.”

Bringing out the best in native ingredients

Schira concedes that cooks these days have to be so much more: “We’ve got to use colour, language, images and emotion in order to animate what’s on the plate. There’s a real interest in the way chefs work. The famous Michael Pollan expression is, ‘You are what you eat, but you are what you eat, eats too’. It doesn’t matter how good my technique is, if I don’t have good ingredients, I can’t make good food.”

This is where working with native ingredients comes in. Schira believes that, “when you treat nature well, it gives you the gift of great food”. Therefore, she looks for simpler things like the balance of the ingredients, experimenting with them until she gets the flavour she needs. And she admits there’s a feeling of elation when creating something new. 

One of Suri’s signature dishes is the vegan nasi rawon (traditionally a beef dish). Among the many items that make up this dish is paru (beef lungs), which obviously isn’t suited for a vegan version. Schira has made it vegan with rehydrated lion mane mushrooms mopped in herby aromatics, then grilled. 

“Rawon is the science of alchemy, it’s like turning stone into gold,” she says. “On one level, the most simple thing imaginable but really elusive and hard to pull off and I was tempted to do a really good version of it.” 

Another specialty dish is the vegan nasi ambeng (a traditional Javanese sharing platter), which features a rendang dish. The name of this traditional dish is often associated with the word ‘merendang’, a term for a technique of slow cooking meat. Schira admits this dish is all about textures and has made her vegan version by achieving this via black abalone mushrooms. 

“This dish is an exercise in patience and great amount of care is required too, continuously stirring all while preventing it from getting burnt,”she explains. “Traditionally, this dish is cooked low and slow for hours and can last for weeks if cooked properly.

“All cooking is transformational, and in that sense, it’s miraculous,” she adds. “These transformations go really deep. I still don’t think I’ve mastered the art of cooking; I can keep refining my skills and I am always game for anything.”

Creating fulfilling meals

Suri has provided catering for events by organisations such as ACRES, The Brother’s Circle and even for celebrities like Nadya Hutagalung. Suri’s new drops are put out on SG Vegan Kakis Telegram and Schira’s personal Facebook page. Schira reveals that her business has had a diverse range of returned clientele, from butchers to “someone who simply just wants to try Malay cuisine that is made with the planet in mind”.

“Suri isn’t just about replicating our mother’s cuisine but stimulating something that is soulful and is fulfilling and, at the same time, something with relevance and a sense of place – that’s what I’m trying to get at,” says Schira. “I’m trying to take people back to those times in their life where people who loved them cooked for them in a way which was really meaningful and really satisfying for them. 

“Everything we eat make up our memory palate,” she adds. “Once you have a good range, you always have that to draw on and just subconsciously almost knowing what works and what doesn’t. I thought, ‘if there’s one customer that likes it, there will be others’.”