Easy Baked Nasi Lemak Curry Puff

Easy Baked Nasi Lemak Curry Puff

Here’s a slightly healthier version of Old Chang Kee’s tasty puff, which you can whip up at home.

We were totally chuffed by Old Chang Kee’s Nasi Lemak Curry Puff. We love the idea of reinterpreting the beloved rice dish into a puff, so we set out to make our own, incorporating coconut milk, which we think is integral to nasi lemak even if OCK decided to leave it out in their version.

Because these are baked instead of deep-fried, the resulting puffs are more crumbly than Old Chang Kee’s, with a hearty coconutty edge to them. The ikan bilis-flecked sambal provides that unmistakable nasi lemak flavour. To make things easy, we used frozen shortcrust pastry, which comes in ready-rolled sheets. We didn’t bother adding pandan leaves or green colouring to the crust because, well, nasi lemak is more about the coconut than pandan, right?

To shape the puffs, we used a curry puff mould that you can pick up at baking supply stores like Phoon Huat for a few bucks. It makes shaping the puffs a less finicky experience — you can see exactly where your filling will fit within the pastry and sealing it shut is a simple matter of clamping both sides of the mould together.