The First Fish Balls I Ate in Singapore

Trying Fish Balls in a Singapore Hawker Centre

Fish balls turn up quickly when you start walking through Singapore’s hawker centres. A stall might serve them in a bowl of noodles, with soup or on a stick.

The first time I tried them was at Chinatown Food Street. Stalls sold chicken, noodles and seafood, and the fish balls fit easily among them. They looked like something you could get for a quick snack or a light meal any day.

The name gave me a rough idea of what I was ordering. Small rounds of fish paste came on a skewer. At other stalls you could see them served in broth.

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How Fish Becomes a Ball

The ball is made from fish ground to a paste. Salt helps give it a springy texture, and some recipes use starch. The paste is shaped into small rounds and cooked, often by boiling or frying.

Different cooks work with different fish. The result often has a firm, elastic bite. It feels a little different from a soft fish cake the moment you bite into it.

Fish-paste dishes have long been part of cooking in southern China and Southeast Asia. Versions carried across the region found a place in the food people make and eat in Singapore.

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An Everyday Hawker Food

Fish balls are everyday food in Singapore. Some stalls sell them by themselves. Others put them in fishball noodles, a dish you can find in hawker centres around the city.

In a noodle dish they might come in clear soup or with a dressing of soy and chilli. Fried fish balls on skewers are another familiar version, in Singapore and elsewhere in the region.

You can see how common the food is just by looking around a hawker centre and counting the ways it shows up.

A small piece of fish paste can have a place in lunch, soup or a quick snack between the two.

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What I Noticed on the First Bite

Mine came on a skewer with sauce. It looked simple until I bit into one.

The shape put me in mind of a fish cake or a meatball. The surprise was how much it sprang back against my teeth. That was the first thing I noticed and the last thing I expected from looking at it.

The taste was mild and clean. The sauce or soup gives it something sharper or saltier to go with the fish, which is one reason it works in so many dishes.

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A Small Part of Hawker Culture

At a hawker centre you can see what people order when they have half an hour for lunch or a few minutes for a snack. Fish balls are one of the things that belong to both kinds of visit.

They’re quick to serve and easy to eat. They show one of the many ways a familiar ingredient has become something a person can order almost without thinking.

It was new to me in Chinatown. I could see that people at the next stall treated it as a perfectly ordinary thing to find.

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The Food You Remember by Chance

There’s a reason to seek out a famous dish when you travel. Sometimes what stays with you is a small snack you ordered without knowing quite what to expect.

For me it was a skewer in a busy food street, something new that was already part of the ordinary life of the city.

A fish ball doesn’t need much ceremony. One bite can give you something to recognize the next time you walk past a hawker stall.