Third-time-lucky Roti canal

One thing about being so far away from Malaysia and Australia (where you can find decent Asian food!), I have to make my own whenever I get a craving!

I’ve been eating loads of healthy food lately and that probably explains my craving for oily and fatty calorie-laden Roti Canai! My body is deprived from its fat input ;-) I suppose it doesn’t help that the hubby loves this as well and when I mentioned that I wanted to try to make it, he didn’t let me forget about it!

Roti canai, as most of you probably already know, is a Malaysian speciality. However, I think in India and Indonesia, it is also known as roti paratha. There’s probably a whole history behind Malaysian roti canai but but I’m too lazy to do the research so there's more information here.

Anyway, this is my third attempt in making roti canai! The first time, I used Amy Beh’s roti canai recipe but for some reason, it just didn’t work for me. First of all, I had trouble stretching out the dough from the recipe, and then when cooked, my roti canai, instead of being crispy on the outside and slightly chewy on the inside, turned out a weird dry-crispy-doughy-flat biscuit! Urghgh.

For my second attempt, I dug up a different recipe. This time after days and days (ok…only 1 day!) of searching the Internet, I found a different recipe by MamaFaMi here. This time, the results were a lot closer to the real thing…but still not quite there. The cooked roti was still a little doughy. Probably because I still didn’t stretch the dough out enough. By then, both the Hubby and I were starting to get very excited by the prospect of having almost-real roti canai!

This brings me to my third attempt. Using the same recipe as a base, I made a few minor modifications and this is so far my most edible attempt!

Here’s what I used:

3 cups flour
roughly 1 cup of water (enough to make a slightly sticky dough)
2 tbs margarine (the original recipe only used 1 tbs)
1 ¼ tsp salt (or to taste)
1 ¼ tsp sugar (or to taste)
2 tbs milk (the original recipe uses condensed milk. I used ordinary low fat milk)
1 tbs oil
Extra oil for frying

1. Mix the salt, sugar and flour in a bowl.
2. Add the milk to the mixture and mix.
3. Add the water bit by bit while mixing (or kneading). Stop when you have a slightly sticky dough. If you add too much water, the dough gets too sticky and it’s a real pain to handle.
4. Add in margarine.
5. Add in the cooking oil.
6. Once the margarine and cooking oil has been well integrated into a smooth dough, divide the dough into small balls (I got about 6 balls out of the dough).
7. Coat the balls with oil and cover. I left them to rest for about an hour.
8. Lightly oil your kitchen workbench and hands.
9. Flatten each ball and slowly stretch the dough to a thin, almost transparent layer. For my first 2 attempts, I used a rolling pin to do this but for the last attempt, I found it was just as easy to just carefully stretch the dough out with my fingers.
10. Fold in 2 opposite sides of the stretched out dough to the middle. Then fold in the other 2 opposite sides to the middle.
11. Fry in a pan.
12. Serve with your favourite curry!

This time, the roti came out really well. However, I think I would add a bit more oil to the dough, as well as when I was cooking it, as it wasn’t as oily as it should be.

Still….mmmmm! Talk about a diet breaker!