Malaysian · Bread
Roti Canai
- Advanced
- 2 h
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, char used as punctuation.
Ingredients
- 500g flour; 1 tsp salt; 1 tbsp sugar; 1 egg
- 250ml water + 3 tbsp condensed milk (the mamak softness secret)
- Ghee or oil: for the dough, the rest, the flip, and your hands
- 6 h to overnight resting, dough balls submerged in oil
- Dhal curry or chicken curry for the mandatory dunk
The skills inside
Griddle & plancha workShaping by hand
The words inside
Resting, Carryover & the Thermometer
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Knead a soft dough; divide into balls; coat in oil; rest MINIMUM 6 hours: the rest does the stretching for you. 360 min
- On an oiled counter: flatten, then flip-slap-stretch the dough tissue-thin (or gently pull to tablecloth thinness, the coward-friendly road; the holes forgive).
- Ripple the sheet like a curtain, coil into a snail, tuck the tail; rest 10 min. 10 min
- Flatten the coil; griddle with ghee until gold and blistered. Then CLAP the hot roti between both hands from the sides: the layers shatter and bloom.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
Shaping by hand 85 recipes
- The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
- Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
- The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
- Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
- They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.
Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir or Gamay
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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