Orange peel and sour plum drink ($1.50)!
A traditional hawker drink: chilled orange peel and sour plum, sweet, tart and a little savoury, with the bits floating in the cup. $1.50.
A nostalgic, thirst-quenching hawker drink: orange peel and sour plum, $1.50. 😋
What I had:
- An iced orange peel and sour plum drink, with the dried peel and plum bits floating on top
This is one of those old-school, made-in-house hawker drinks you don’t see at the bubble tea chains, and at $1.50 it is wonderfully cheap. It is the cousin of the classic suan mei tang (sour plum drink), brewed up with dried orange peel (chen pi) and sour plums simmered with a bit of sugar, then chilled right down with ice.
The flavour is what makes it: sweet up front, then a big hit of tart from the sour plums, with a faint savoury-salty edge and that fragrant, slightly bitter citrus note from the orange peel. It is complex and grown-up in a way a plain soft drink never is, and the floating peel and plum bits tell you it was made the proper way rather than from a powder.
On a hot, sticky day it is brilliantly refreshing, the sourness really cutting through the heat and waking up your palate. Cheap, traditional and exactly the kind of drink I love finding at a hawker centre.
Overall: 4.6 / 5. 😋👍🏼 Sweet, tart and fragrant, a proper old-school sour plum drink for $1.50. Would re-order.
