Junk food of the week: Curry puff

It pains me to characterize the curry puff as junk food, when in fact it is the greatest snack ever invented, representing the culmination of thousands of years of snack research. But curry puffs are deep-fried, and fair is fair.


The curry puff is sold all over Singapore, in places ranging from roadside stalls to upscale bakeries. The dough can be a simple flour-and-butter crust or a fancier puff pastry. The one pictured below is a humble but especially tasty version from a food stall (the Tip Top stall at Ang Mo Kio, if you're wondering).


Inside are chunks of chicken, potato and hard-boiled egg, bound with a thick, non-leaky curry sauce. The sauce is usually not very incendiary; the emphasis is on earthier spices like cumin and cloves.


Curry puffs are substantial; one puff makes for a quick, cheap lunch. A good one is not too buttery and not too oily, and has a complex curry flavor. Luckily a chain of Singapore pufferies has opened some stalls here in Jakarta, so I don't have to take an international flight to get my fix.

Eating lotus

It must have been lotus season in Cambodia because people were selling them everywhere as snacks. These women were hawking them outside our bus at the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

To eat them, you have to rip open the fibrous flower head.

Then you peel off the seed's little green jacket. You're left with a pure-white rounded cylinder that looks like a little pill or maybe an earplug. They have a slightly foam-like texture, like a mushroom but crunchier, and a mild planty taste like cucumber.

It wasn't my favorite snack ever (I think that would still be the glorious curry puff), but it was fun to try, given the importance of the lotus to Asian culture and religion -- and the number of lotus statues, bas-reliefs and paintings we've seen over the last few weeks.