Still Feeling Peckish

Since the onset of the Covid19 pandemic, I’ve had plenty of reasons to be thankful to be living in Singapore. The most obvious of course is that besides the outbreak in the migrant worker dormitories, the community situation has remained controlled which allows us to move around relatively freely. The second of course is that given the lack of overseas travel, at least we still have a pretty nice place to live in.

But what makes Singapore really an amazing place to live in is the street food! I grew up eating not just Chinese food but absolutely loving Malay and Indian food as well. In fact, I remember one of my researcher friends telling me that years ago he tried to track the impact of food on ethnic risk for diabetes and discovered that it was a failed study because Singaporeans eat everything! You will not find a Chinese Singaporean who does not eat nasi lemak or roti prata, or a Malay Singaporean who does not have halal Chinese food options. Food in Singapore is an absolute melting pot of cultures and in this season I kind of feel that even though we can’t physically travel, we can go on adventures of the palate!

Recently I’ve been doing lots of fathead dough recipes – all kinds of savoury puffs and sausage rolls. It’s a big favourite of the kids and so I would make a new recipe once a week. But a couple of days ago I had a sudden craving for murtabak, which is a well loved street food in Malaysia and Singapore. It’s like a meat stuffed pastry that’s fried on a griddle. The 2 most common varieties are mutton murtabak and chicken murtabak, but I used minced beef here because it’s so much easier to get ground beef than lamb or mutton in a regular supermarket. What I really love about murtabak is also the egg in the filling (I’m a secret egg lover).

The dough in traditional murtabak is flour-based and is usually stretched out paper thin, then folded over the stuffing and pan fried on a well-oiled griddle. Fathead dough does hold together pretty well although I must admit that I had some leaks of the filling as some of the dough was rolled out too thin. The other trick about frying fathead dough is that the fire should be relatively low to make sure the dough is cooked fully.

My parents are always willing guinea pigs for my cooking experiments! And I am always amused at how they might have had their cereal breakfast but they didn’t mind tucking into murtabak immediately after. Anyway the feedback was good and they said that the murtabak flavour was “like the real thing”.