Murtabak is a popular fried bread dish with a meat filling, commonly sold on the streets of Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries. It is flavored with herbs and spices and can be served with curry sauce. The dough is thin and requires skill to make.
Murtabak is a specific regional version of a traditional type of food popular in many parts of the world. It’s a kind of fried bread. Different variations of this dish are well known in parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other neighboring locales as well as areas of Southeast Asia from Indonesia to Singapore and Malaysia. In Arabic, the word is transliterated as mutabbak or mutabbaq, but in Malaysia especially, the local recipe is written as murtabak.
A meat filling is often used in traditional Malaysian murtabak. The completed recipe resembles a sandwich. The bread is filled with various items, often with mutton or similar meat, as well as eggs, garlic and onions. Other common ingredients include jalapeno or serrano peppers. Many recipes also call for ghee, locally called “ghee” as part of the frying process or as a side dish for the dish.
In parts of Malaysia, murtabak is commonly sold on the street. Vendors in small kiosks can cook this food to order and serve it to passers-by. This process for cooking fried bread products differs markedly from the usual methods of some other regions of the world, where fried bread discs are often served in restaurants on a platter, topped with other items such as syrup or molasses.
In murtabak and other popular street dishes of the region, the minced meat is flavored with a combination of herbs which gives the food unique flavours. These include coriander and mint, two highly prized spices in the region. Some versions of murtabak are also sold with curry sauce.
In the etymology of the dish, the previously mentioned Arabic mutabachi sometimes translated as “bent”, which helps explain the shape of the dish as it is sold around the world. Varieties of murtabak are folded in different ways for a variety of presentations. Some may be formed with circular molds or otherwise made neatly circular, where as others will be rolled into long rolls and cut into sliced portions.
A challenge in making murtabak is getting the dough extremely thin, as some versions of the dish are made with very thin sheets of bread. In some cases, traditional vendors of this food spin the dough to thin it out, where the specific skill is acquired over time. Those who want to imitate these culinary merchants may need to expend significant time and effort to make their versions as attractive and well-formed as those they’ve found in traditional street markets.
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