Butter Bread

Butter Bread, as the name suggests, has butter as its main ingredient. Butter gives the bread a rich flavour. We usually eat it on its own i.e. there is no requirement of a spread. Other ingredients include milk, sugar and egg. Depending on one's preference, butter bread can be shaped in a number of ways, the simplest being to just roll up the dough and place into a loaf pan to be baked. Or, the dough can be rolled up, sliced and the sliced dough arranged in a loaf pane or a round pan as described below.

Ingredients:

• 160 ml warm milk
• 40 g sugar
• 7 g yeast
• 50 ml melted butter
• 1 egg
• 400 g bread flour
• 5 g salt
• 40 ml melted butter (for brushing on dough)
• 1 egg yoke (for brushing on dough before baking)

Instructions:

• Activate the yeast:
• Add warm milk to the bowl of a mixer.
• Add the sugar and yeast to the bowl.
• Stir and wait for 5-10 minutes for bubbles to be formed.

• Once the yeast has been activated, add melted butter and egg white to the yeast mixture.

• Then add the bread flour and salt to it.

• Knead till window pane is achieved.

• Rest the dough till it doubles in size.

• Punch down the dough to de-gas.

• Flour your counter top.

• Transfer the dough onto it and shape it into a ball.

• Roll out the dough to a rectangle, 20 inches x 12 inches. (If you do not have a big counter space, you may divide the dough into 2.

• Spread melted butter onto it.

• Roll up the dough (from the longer side up).

• Now you would have a long roll.

• Slice the dough into the number of pieces you want.

• Place them in an overlapping manner into a round baking pan which is lined with greased parchment paper. (My pan is 8 inches in diameter.)

• Let it proof till double in size.

• Brush the dough with egg yoke.

• Bake the dough in a pre-heated oven at 175 deg C for 35 minutes.

• Remove the bread from the baking pan and let it cool on a metal rack.

Ikan Tenggiri (Mackerel) Masak Lemak

My family and I went to have lunch at a nyonya restaurant and one of the dishes we order was Ikan Tenggiri Masak Lemak. It was very delicious; the fish was very fresh and the sauce was creamy with a tinge of sweetness, saltiness and sourness. So, I decided to replicate it at home. The resulting dish was similar to that we ate at the restaurant. 

Ingredients:

a. 2 slices of ikan tenggiri

b. For blending

• 10 g chili padi
• 8 g dried chili
• 75 g shallots
• 25 g garlic
• 50 g lemongrass (white part only)
• 20 g fresh turmeric
• 20 g galangal
• 20 g ginger
• 25 g belacan, toasted
• 15 g candlenut
• 1 cup water

c. For cooking

• all of the blended ingredients
• 1/2 cup cooking oil
• 3 g assam keping
• 1 cup water
• 2 stalks lemongrass, bruised 
• 1 cups thick santan
• 2 pcs of kafir lime leaves
• 1 tsp salt or to taste
• 1 tsp sugar

Method:

• Blend all ingredients stated above under "For Blending".

• Heat up pan with cooking oil.

• Add all of the blended ingredients to the pan.

• Fry them till they are fragrant and oil splits from the ingredients.

• Add water, assam keping and lemongrass.

• Let the sauce simmer slowly for about 5 minutes.

• Add the santan and let it boil. (If sauce is too thick, add some water. It should not be too thin either.)

• Add kafir lime leaves.

• Season with salt and sugar.

• Add the tenggiri. (Do not overcook.)

• Serve with white rice.

Ondeh-Ondeh Jagung

I have made ondeh-ondeh purple sweet potato and ondeh-ondeh pandan before. I decided to look for other ingredients to be added to my ondeh-ondeh dough to make my cooking journey more interesting and to give my family more variety of taste. So, I came up with jagung or corn. I modified my ondeh-ondeh pandan recipe to make my ondeh-ondeh jagung. 

Ingredients:

• 200 g glutinous rice flour
• 50 g all-purpose flour
• 300 g creamed corn
• 150 g coconut flakes
• 1/2 tsp of salt
• 3 pandan leaves, wash and knot them.

Method:

• Add salt to grated coconut and steam them for a few minutes.

• Open a can of creamy style corn and weigh out 300 g to be used in the recipe.

• Weigh and sieve the glutinous and all-purpose flours into a bowl.

• Add 90 percent of the creamed corn to the bowl of flours and knead till they are smooth. If the dough is too dry, add more of the creamed corn till you have a soft dough.

• Divide and weigh the dough into 23 g-piece. Roll the dough into balls. (You may weigh to make smaller or bigger dough balls. Note that the balls will enlarge once cooked.)

• Pound the cylindrical block of gula Melaka to break it up into smaller pieces.

• Take a dough ball. Flatten it and scoop 1/2 a teaspoon or more of gula Melaka onto it. Bring up the edges of the dough to seal it. Place it onto a floured plate.

• Repeat this till all the dough balls have been filled.

• Boil a pot of water. Add the knotted pandan leaves to it.

• Drop the dough balls into the boiling water.

• Once the dough balls float to the surface, it means that they are cooked. Let them roll in the boiling water for about 5 minutes more to ensure that the gula Melaka is melted.

• Remove the cooked balls onto the plate of grated coconut. Roll them in the grated coconuts. (I managed to get 24 pieces of ondeh-ondeh from my recipe.)

• Plate them and serve.