Roti Canai

Never in my life did I think that one day I will make roti canai. It is something so easily available and considerably cheap back home in Malaysia. Almost any time of the day or night, you can get roti canai. They are normally available at hawker stalls that we call "mamak stalls". Mamak in Malaysia refers to the Indian Muslim community. You can probably say that they monopolise the roti canai making industry. 

These mamak stalls sell many different kinds of roti but my favourite is still the original roti canai, freshly pan fried and served with curry. Sometimes these stalls can be very busy and they prepare the roti canai in advance. That is when everything goes wrong. Roti has to be served hot from the pan. The texture has to be crispy and flaky. If it is prepared in advance, it loses all that quality.

Preparing the dough for resting.

There are many variations to the roti canai, endless creations really. You can have roti with banana, also one of my favourites, roti with egg, roti with cheese, roti with milo, roti with sardine, roti with nutella, roti tissue where the roti is not folded when fried, therefore you get all the surface to be light and crispy or you can have the total opposite which is roti bomb where the dough is not  flatten much and fried thickly to get a doughy texture. That is the one that I absolutely do not like. 

Not so square plain roti canai.

 I guess you can say that I miss Malaysian food very much because I went searching for recipes to make roti canai. I found a few recipes from bloggers and decided to try ieatishootipost's recipe because he explained it quite thoroughly and he even had a video of him flipping the roti. It was a very helpful site.  It requires some skills to flip a good roti.

Roti for dinner.

It was really quite interesting that the recipe actually didn't use that much oil. I thought it will be so oily that I won't ever want to eat roti again. I rested the dough in the fridge overnight and I made fresh roti for dinner and lunch the next day. For dinner we had it with lamb curry and indian style thoran cabbage. Yummy.

A nicer square roti.

The roti turned out pretty good. It was crispy and not too oily. I still need to practise on the flipping though. I managed to get a nicer square after a few rounds of practise. I also made roti cheese and roti telur (egg) served with bacon. Next time, I want to try with vegemite and cheese. hehe....

Any orders?

Roti Telur with bacon.

Roti Cheese.