Maritime Southeast Asia · Volume 45, The Mortar, the Wok and the Roti Board
Otak-otak
Straits Malay/Peranakan; Muar, Johor, the best-known regional centre
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 10
- Researched
- Researched from 231 sources in the brief
Muar, in southern Johor, wraps its version in attap palm leaf instead and is the best-known regional centre for the dish today.
As tradition built it
Makes 10. 40 minutes' preparation, 30 minutes' cooking.
Ingredients
The spice paste
- 10g dried chillies
- 3 fresh red chillies
- 15g fresh turmeric
- 10 shallots
- 3 cloves garlic
- 30g galangal
- 3 stalks lemongrass
- 10g ginger
- 100g oil
The fish
- 150g fish fillet, skinned
- 100g coconut milk
- 100g water
- ¼ tsp white pepper
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp sugar
- 15g tapioca flour
To wrap
- 10 banana leaf pieces, 15 by 10 cm
- as needed toothpicks
Method
- Soak the dried chillies, then boil them 4 minutes over a medium heat until soft. Remove the seeds and membranes.
- Chop the other spices and herbs small. Blend everything with the oil until fine.
- Fry the paste over a medium-low heat, stirring all the time, until fragrant and the oil separates. Cool to room temperature.
- Pour off the excess oil. Blend the paste with the fish, coconut milk, water, pepper, salt, sugar and tapioca flour to a fine paste.
- Put 40g of paste on each banana leaf, fold it over and pin both ends with toothpicks.
- Cook the parcels in a pan over a medium-low heat, 1 to 2 minutes each side, longer if thick.
Notes
The recipe is Karin's at Nyonya Cooking, after the otak-otak of Muar. Opah Mas Cotek's Nyonya version in Rasa blends the paste raw with 500g of tenggiri, egg, cornflour, wild betel and lime leaves, and grills or steams it. Amie Samuri's Johor version in Mingguan Wanita fries and cools the paste, works it with the fish five minutes for spring, and grills it thin on banana or coconut leaf.
What a modern chef changes
The Big Green Egg run indirect, exactly the profile this parcel needs
Rung 6
Method
- Run the Big Green Egg indirect at a steady, moderate temperature, exactly the profile this parcel actually needs, rather than the hard, close, uneven heat a home charcoal grill often defaults to, holding the leaf at the edge of charring for longer without ever burning through it.
- Fold a little labneh-style strained yoghurt into the fish paste before wrapping, for a lighter, silkier set than the traditional egg-and-coconut-milk binding alone gives.