Category: Food and Drink

One of our favorite sayings is "I bet Google knows." We say this when we don’t know something, or when are having an argument.  Lately, Google has also been particularly useful in helping us find recipes for local cuisine.  Sometimes our local cookbooks are confusing or misleading, and sometimes we just like to get a second opinion on a recipe.  The problem comes from sifting through a whole bunch of Indonesian and Malaysian foodie sites.  In the past couple days we’ve made an effort to find the best Indonesian and Malaysian food sites out there.  Without further ado, here they are.

Indonesian

• Merry’s Kitchen has lots of good recipes.  The directions are easy to follow, and as Merry did her undergrad and Kansas and an MBA at Golden Gate University, her English is flawless.  Lots of good recipes for things like semur lidah (Ox Tongue in Sweet Nutmeg Sauce), and more tame things.  Especially good for spice paste and sambal recipes.
• Kokkie Blanda is also good.  Blanda means "Dutch", and Kokkie probably means "cook" in Dutch.  At any rate, this site is more expansive than Merry’s Kitchen, but the names are all in Indonesian so you can’t tell what you’re going to get before you click it unless you know what the names mean.  Plus, our Dutch cook has spelled all the Indonesian names in the old Dutch style, so dulu becomes doeloe and ayam becomes ajam.  Annoying.  But things are organized by type of dish at least, so if you pick what kind of food you want, you can just browse.  The recipe for lemper (sweet sticky rice stuffed with chicken) looks excellent.
• Claudia Lum has some great recipes, but they are all in Indonesian, and some of the links don’t work.
• Dapur PInter is another good Indonesian language site with lots of deserts.  It is heavy on Dutch-inspired and Javanese dishes, as well as having some recipes from the Outer Islands.  Its name is a play on the acronym of the ISP (Pacific Indonesia) and the slang version of pintar, meaning "smart".

Malaysian

• The name of the site www.MalaysianFood.net says it all.  It’s easily the best Malaysian food site out there.  It breaks things down into five categories–Malay, Chinese, Indian, Eurasian (mostly Portuguese) and Nyonya (or Straits Chinese)–and has good descriptions of every type of food in its historical context.  Even if you don’t like to cook, it’s fun to read.  Be sure to check out the recipes for Devil Curry and Rojak, which you can make at home in the US with little trouble.
• Kuali is the online food page for The Star, an English-language Malaysian broadsheet.  It has some very good recipes, but it includes recipes for lots of different cuisines and the organization stinks.  Under "Cuisine" you can jump straight to Malay or Nyonya food, or browse through the Chinese and Indian sections, which include lots of local favorites but also stuff you’re more likely to find in China or India than Malaysia.
• Mesra.net – Resepi has thousands of recipes that all look good.  Alas, it’s also in Malay, and very slang-y Malay at that, so non-Malay speakers will be out of luck.

We also have some good news regarding ingredients.  Almost nobody outside of residents of NYC or LA will have access to an Indonesian or Malaysian grocery store, but there are two sites worth noting.  IndoMerchant will send Indonesian food right to your door from Los Angeles, and it won’t cost very much either.  Their selection is great.  You can get the little things like kecap manis and terasi and sale, and also weird ingredients like keluak (groundnuts), daun salam (salam leaves), and others that are impossible to find in the US.  (Thai food lovers: they will ship you fresh kaffir lime leaves.)  Most of the weird ingredients that we’ve listed in our recipes can be found here, for cheap.  Regarding Malaysian food, you can visit the online store at www.MalaysianFood.net and get good things as well.  You can even get Bah Kut Teh spices (see our recent recipe below), prepackaged!
 

Having Betsy here re-acquainted us with the joys of South Indian-style breads here in Malaysia.  We are pretty sure that her single favorite dish from the entire time we were here was roti canai, the stretched, folded, flaky, flat, fried Indian bread whose recipe we posted here.  We tried it a couple times at several different places, and JM and I  agreed that our existing recipe is almost entirely unsatisfactory.  The problem is the thin flakiness.  No matter how thin you roll out those doughs, they will never have the light and airy quality of real roti canai as thrown by the roti canai man.  It’s not even close.  And the multiple-layered quality is what makes roti canai so good.  The outside layers are crisp and brown, and the inside layers are soft and chewy.  We can sort of get the crispy brown outside right, but our inside layers are doughy and raw, not soft and chewy.  Soft and chewy != doughy.

So last night we bought a whole bunch of flour and ghee and spent the evening following some recipes we have seen online to make roti canai the authentic way.  Simply put, the theory is to make a dough, stretch it out incredibly thin, gently fold it a couple times (trapping a bit of air between the layers), and then toss is on the griddle.  We ran into all sort of problems, although we had a nice time.  The most immediate problem is that the dough recipe make a dough that doesn’t make sense to someone familiar with Western-style breads and pastas.  To us, the dough seems intolerably wet.  The dough recipe that we followed called for 2 lbs. of flour along with 2 cups of water and about a half cup of ghee and two eggs (along with some other things).  If you mix that together, you get paste, not dough.  You can’t even knead it because it just sticks to your hands.  When we made our dough, we didn’t even use the whole 2 cups of water.  Even a cup and a half seems wrong.

JM tried another dough recipe that we saw.  This one was simple: 10 oz of flour, half a cup of water, half a cup of ghee.  This simply didn’t work.  We could not shape it into anything, even after letting it rest for 3 hours.  We just had to throw it away.

We pressed on with my dough, though.  We used about a cup and a half of water, let it sit for half an hour, divided it into 12 balls, and then let it sit for a half hour more.  At this point, we tried to emulate the workings of the roti canai man.  In a very loose way, the roti canai man works sort of like someone tossing a pizza.  In this case, though, he stretches the dough far thinner, and his dough is very sticky rather than smooth and pliable like a good pizza dough.  So instead of tossing his dough, the roti canai man has to sort of spin it around his hand, gently but firmly, until he has a piece of dough about half again as big as a large pizza, but transluscent.  We couldn’t get this motion down without tearing the dough.  We also couldn’t figure out how to prevent the dough from collapsing back and sticking to itself instead of staying stretched.  We did manage to get it thin enough to see through, but only in the middle of the dough, and only when we gently stretched it out on the counter.  The corners still were far too thick, and this is fatal for roti canai, because it can’t cook right if this is the case.  We furthermore learned that with this dough, you only get one chance.  If you toss it and it tears irreparably, you cannot just kneed it again and start over.  The dough will just tear.

So, we made a whole bunch of gimpy roti canai.  About half our dough attempts were unsalvageable.  About a quarter more ended up black on the outside and raw in the middle.  The remainder were a reasonable approximation, but without nearly the correct inner flakiness.  I (TP) have toyed with the idea of simply asking a roti canai man what his recipe is and how he does it.  I am not particularly optimistic, though.  I’m not sure what language I would use to converse with them, to begin with, as many working class Indians speak only limited Malay and English.  They also think that we are idiots at our favorite roti canai stall because we always order it at around 2 in the afternoon, and everybody knows that you eat roti canai before noon or after 4.

We have found some illustrative pictures online.  Here’s a picture of roti canai on the griddle, and this picture shows the dough.  (Roti prata is the name for roti canai in Singapore.)  This series shows roti canai being made: Flattening, stretching, spinning.