Malay curry puffs. epok-epok. Karipap. Whatever the name is, I don’t know any Singaporean who does not like this. I love curry puffs. Then one night (yes, night), I was suddenly awoken from my slumber and could not fall back to sleep. Oh, it wasn’t night though it was very dark for sure. I looked at my watch and saw that it was oh, only two in the morning? So I got out from bed and surfed the net on my portable ipad. And then I decided, what the hey, let’s just go try make some curry puffs. And make them I did. I only had tuna available so I used that for my filling, adding in some green chillies and sriracha (Vietnamese American chilli sauce). It worked! I mean, even though it was five a.m. when I completed the whole thing, I felt amazed that my maiden attempt at making this difficult (in my mind, it was) snack was a success. I brought a few to work and gave some to my mom. The comment was generally positive except that it was rather dry.
The next night, I decided to make again! Even though it was still a school day. This time round, I made sure I added more butter. My recipe called for 4 cups of flour (this will yield plenty plenty of curry puffs), 6 tbsp of margarine (I used olive margarine, but next time, I’ll use the cheaper Planta) and roughly a small IKEA kids plastic glass of ice cold salted water. I used the processor to whiz my flour with the fat and then transfer it to a big bowl and proceeded to add in the cold water to the mixture until a dough is formed. Make sure you don’t add a lot of water.
For the filling, I used minced beef and potatoes, seasoned very simply with powdered cumin and powdered coriander. Next time, I’ll add fresh coriander. And then, because I had years of making curry puff using plasticine as a child, I had no problems making the pretty curls at the end of the puff. What do you call them? The frying is terribly slow. You cant fry them in high heat or you’ll end up with burnt dough. So it takes 20 minutes for a batch to be cooked. However, this second attempt was way much better.
The Occasional Cook 