Maritime Southeast Asia · Volume 48, The Phinisi Route, the Kluwak Pot and the Buffalo’s Horn

Jalangkote

Name: Jalangkote
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: Makes about 20
Cuisine: Sulawesi, the Bugis, Makassar and Toraja World
Ingredients: 400 g plain flour; 60 g butter; 1 egg; 120 ml water; 200 g chicken, diced small; 2 carrots, diced small; 2 potatoes, diced small; 50 g glass noodles, soaked and chopped; 4 shallots, sliced; 3 garlic cloves, sliced; as needed oil, for deep frying; as needed rice vinegar and bird's eye chilli, for the sambal cuka

Makassar

Jalangkote, thin-shelled fried pastry filled with vegetables and chicken, served with a liquid chilli vinegar sambal: a small pile of pale golden, crimped half moon pastries with a thin, blistered, crisp shell, one broken open to show a filling of diced carrot.

Illustration

Time: 1 hour 30

Researched: Researched from 119 sources in the brief

Jalangkote is explicitly described in Indonesian sourcing as a comparatively modern dish, its thin, crisp-shelled, fried pastry technique traced to Spanish and Portuguese contact carrying empanada method into the archipelago, the shared ancestor behind the Philippines' own pastel as well. The name is popularly explained, though not from a cited linguistic source, as combining Makassarese "jalang," to walk, and "kote," to call out, describing how the snack was historically sold door to door by children walking and calling as they went.

by Makassar

The Chinese layer arrived through the same port and stayed inside the food rather than beside it. Tauco, fermented soybean paste, sits at the centre of coto Makassar's own signature sambal, and the etymology of "coto" itself is genuinely, credibly contested between a Hokkien root meaning roughly "spiced offal" and a separate Makassarese reading, "a cut," referring to the chopped meat and offal at the dish's centre; no source this chapter has found settles it either way, and it should not be settled here. Two of the coast's best documented dishes are Chinese-Makassarese inventions with named founders and real dates rather than court legends: mie titi, crisp fried dry noodles under a thick sauce of chicken, prawn, mushroom, liver and squid, created by Ang Kho Tjao in the 1950s and popularised under his daughter Titi's name from the 1970s; and jalangkote, the coast's thin, crisp-skinned pastry, which multiple Indonesian sources trace to nineteenth century Iberian contact bringing empanada technique into the archipelago, the same shared ancestor behind the Philippines' own empanada and pastel. Makassar's food identity is real, and it has never once been ethnically sealed.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes about 20. About 1.5 hours.

Ingredients

400 g plain flour
60 g butter
1 egg
120 ml water
200 g chicken, diced small
2 carrots, diced small
2 potatoes, diced small
50 g glass noodles, soaked and chopped
4 shallots, sliced
3 garlic cloves, sliced
as needed oil, for deep frying
as needed rice vinegar and bird's eye chilli, for the sambal cuka

Method

Rub the butter into the flour, then bind with the egg and water into a smooth, firm dough. Rest 30 minutes.
Sauté shallot and garlic, add the chicken, carrot and potato, and cook through; stir in the glass noodles and season.
Roll the dough thin and cut into rounds.
Fill each round, fold and crimp firmly into a half moon.
Deep fry in hot oil at 170°C until deep golden and crisp, a few minutes each side.
Serve with a liquid sambal of vinegar, sliced chilli and a little sugar and salt, not a paste.

What a modern chef changes

A dehydrator-crisped shell and a properly built sambal cuka

Rung 3's leaf-wrap discipline applied to the dough's own moisture control instead

Method

Rest the rolled dough sheets in a dehydrator at a low setting for 20 minutes before filling, drawing a little surface moisture out for a shell that fries noticeably crisper and blisters less unevenly than a freshly rolled dough does.
Build the sambal cuka as a properly balanced ratio, vinegar, sugar and salt measured rather than guessed, ground chilli worked through in a spice grinder for an even heat rather than uneven chunks.
Fry in two stages, a lower temperature pass to cook the filling through fully, then a hotter, brief second pass to colour and crisp the shell, a genuine improvement on the single-temperature fry a street stall's volume does not allow time for.

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