'I want to use this to preserve our heritage food': Engineer-turned-hawker uses machines to fry Hokkien mee

We've seen many beloved eateries shutter as age and health issues catch up with their owners. 

Worried that local hawker culture could disappear in a few years, Hong Jifeng (transliteration) decided to test out a novel solution.

Called Wok A.I., his stall is located at Margaret Drive Hawker Centre and the noodles are fried with the help of two machines.

Jifeng, who'd developed his own recipe, had quit his full-time job as an engineer a year ago to set up the Hokkien mee stall.

"I decided that if no one wants to do this job, I have to rely on machinery and try it out to see if it works," the 53-year-old said in an interview with 8World.

With the industry known to be tough and people being reluctant to join it, Jifeng believes that the wok can be replaced with technology to reduce the workload.

He explained: "Humans have their weaknesses. I personally fried 30 plates of Hokkien mee for my friends. By the 20th plate, my eyes really hurt, and by the 20th or 30th plate, I would just fry it without much care.

"Machines don't have this problem. They will fry 100 plates in the same way, so the taste is consistent. I think this is the biggest advantage of machines."

Hokkien mee aficionado and content creator Botak Jazz had also visited Wok A.I. and filmed a behind-the-scenes look at the stall.

The "robot", as he called it, contains a chamber with a rotating arm that cooks the noodles inside. A stall employee has to follow instructions on the screen and manually place ingredients such as prawns, fish cake and pork belly into the machine.

Jifeng told him: "I've got a friend in Wuhan, China, who builds these machines and first introduced me to them for frying rice.

"But I told him I wanted to use this to preserve our heritage food like Hokkien mee and char kway teow.

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Botak Jazz gave the dish, which costs $5.50, a "fairly good" six out of 10.

He noted that the pork lard included was "generous" and "freshly deep fried" with a good fragrance, and he liked the belacan chilli.

However, the dish had "close to zero wok hei" (wok's 'breath') according to him and its broth lacked a strong taste of prawn.

"But the umami is good. It's a decent plate of Hokkien mee with decent flavours," he concluded.

Jifeng admitted to 8World that the hardest part is imbuing this wok hei to the stir-fried noodles. He has also been collecting customers' feedback daily and adjusting the machines' settings at night.

"I believe, given 14 days, I can get the wok hei to the level I want," he added.

Hong also hopes that the jobs currently done by humans — such as peeling and boiling prawns — can be done by machines in two or three years.

He also thinks these pre-programmed machines can be used overseas, where getting authentic chefs may be difficult, and aims to set up eateries abroad in the future.

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