Murtabak
● MalaysiaMurtabak originated in Yemen, where the word translates roughly as "folded." From the southern Arabian peninsula it spread along Indian Ocean trading routes, carried by Hadrami Yemeni merchants who established communities in coastal India, particularly in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. There, Indian-Muslim cooks took the basic concept, a thin pancake folded around a savory filling, and reinvented it with subcontinental spices, ghee, and minced mutton. By the 19th century, Tamil-Muslim immigrants had carried murtabak to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where it became a fixture of mamak stalls and pasar malam (night markets). The Malaysian and Singaporean versions are particularly hefty: a thin elastic dough is stretched paper-thin on an oiled steel surface, filled with spiced minced lamb or chicken, beaten egg, and chopped onion, then folded into a square parcel and griddled in copious ghee until shatteringly crisp. Served with a side of curry sauce or tamarind-onion relish, murtabak is festival food and night-market royalty.
In Malaysia, murtabak is night food. The mamak stalls of Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Johor Bahru begin frying murtabak around eight in the evening and continue past midnight, drawing crowds of office workers, students, and families. The Ramadan bazaar versions are particularly grand, with cooks performing the dough-stretching at street level for crowds gathered to break their fast. Murtabak is shared food: a single one is enormous, sliced into squares with a metal spatula, and meant to feed three or four people around a low plastic table. The dish is also a marker of mamak culture, the Tamil-Muslim communities of Malaysia whose food has become essential to Malaysian national identity.
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Ingredients
- 4 sheets murtabak dough or thin roti canai dough
- 250g minced mutton or chicken, spiced with curry powder, garam masala, ginger
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1 large onion, finely chopped
- Fresh coriander leaves
- Ghee for frying
- Curry sauce and pickled onion (to serve)
Method
- Stretch the dough as thin as possible on an oiled surface
- Sauté the spiced minced meat with onion until cooked through, then mix with beaten egg and coriander
- Spread the filling across the center of the dough sheet
- Fold the four edges over the filling to form a square parcel
- Pan-fry in plenty of ghee on a hot griddle until both sides are deep golden and crisp; cut into squares to serve