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

Mie Titi

Name: Mie Titi
Total time: 45 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Sulawesi, the Bugis, Makassar and Toraja World
Ingredients: 400 g dried egg noodles; as needed oil, for deep frying the noodles; 200 g chicken, sliced thin; 150 g prawns, peeled; 100 g squid, sliced; 100 g chicken liver, sliced; 100 g mushrooms, sliced; 4 garlic cloves, chopped; 700 ml chicken stock; 2 tbsp cornflour, slaked; 1 tbsp oyster sauce; to taste white pepper and salt, to taste

Makassar

Mie titi, crisp fried dry noodles under a thick sauce of chicken, prawn, squid and mushroom: a bed of golden, tightly tangled crisp fried noodles on a round plate, a glossy pale brown sauce ladled thickly over the centre.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 45 minutes

Researched: Researched from 119 sources in the brief, none yet linked in the text
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Mie titi's history is unusually precise for a South Sulawesi dish: created by Ang Kho Tjao, a Chinese-Makassarese cook, in the 1950s, and passed down to his three children, Hengky, Awa' and Titi, the dish becoming known under Titi's own name specifically because her version of the family stall became the most popular from the 1970s onward. This chapter treats it plainly as a Chinese-Indonesian dish woven into Makassar's food identity, not a Bugis or Makassar dish by ethnic origin, the cleanest single proof in this whole volume that the coast's cooking was never sealed off from outside technique.

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

Serves 4. About 45 minutes.

Ingredients

400 g dried egg noodles
as needed oil, for deep frying the noodles
200 g chicken, sliced thin
150 g prawns, peeled
100 g squid, sliced
100 g chicken liver, sliced
100 g mushrooms, sliced
4 garlic cloves, chopped
700 ml chicken stock
2 tbsp cornflour, slaked
1 tbsp oyster sauce
to taste white pepper and salt, to taste

Method

Deep fry the dried noodles in hot oil in small batches until crisp and golden; drain and set aside.
Fry the garlic until fragrant, then add the chicken, prawn, squid and liver in sequence, searing each briefly.
Add the mushrooms and stock, bring to a simmer, and season with oyster sauce, white pepper and salt.
Thicken with the slaked cornflour to a glossy, coating sauce.
Pour the hot sauce over the crisp fried noodles just before serving, so the noodles stay crisp under a hot, thick topping.

What a modern chef changes

A smoked chicken component and a properly clarified sauce

Rung 1's reduction discipline applied to a Chinese-style sauce rather than a Sulawesi broth

Method

Smoke a portion of the chicken over applewood on a Big Green Egg before slicing it into the topping, a genuine textural and flavour contrast against the seared prawn, squid and liver, offered here as this chapter's own extrapolation rather than a documented Ang Kho Tjao family technique.
Reduce the stock by a third before thickening it, concentrating the sauce's own savoury depth rather than relying on cornflour alone to build body, the same measured-reduction logic rung 1 sets out for coto's own broth.
Fry the noodles in two heights of oil temperature, a lower pass to cook them through, a brief hotter pass to finish the colour, for a more even, less patchy crispness across the whole nest than a single fry gives.

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