Murtabak

Bread travels. Pilgrims, nomads, sailors, warriors, and conquerors alike take it with them and it ends up getting adapted to new climes and conditions. Several centuries later, it is often difficult to recognize the original bread, because it ends up blending into the culinary landscape of the country of adoption. But if you scratch below the surface just a little, it often becomes obvious. Murtabak was, in another life, Indian bread, and the Malays simply adapted it to their taste. The fact is the Indians have had a strong influence on the region in general.

This piece of dough, rolled out extremely thin, to the point that it is translucent, had a long history before it ever landed in Malaysia. One day long, long ago, an Indian bread maker with his head a little in the clouds added a bit of fat at the same time he rolled out the dough circle used to make a classic roti, also referred to as chapati, and so doing invented a new bread, cooked on a greased metal plate, and called paratha. Some of the greatest inventions do, after all, arise out of a careless mistake such as this, or a stroke of boldness and genius. Gastronomy has seen many cases of this. So the paratha is most certainly the ancestor of our murtabak.

The art of making murtabak falls on a few “trapeze” artists. Once this dough has been kneaded, with neither leavening nor yeast, it is divided into dough rolls, which are rolled out into the thinnest possible circles. This is when the acrobatics start. Each murtabak is literally thrown into the air so as to stretch it as much as possible, to the limits of its extensibility, and obtain these dough “veils” that would tear with just a breath of wind, or that wind would take away in a flash.