Singapore or Malaysian curry puffs are a well-known street food snack, which originally arrived with South Indian workers in the nineteenth century. Whereas they would have been predominantly vegetable in their original form, the south east Asian version is more familiar as a chicken or lamb version and sometimes even has a coconut base to the filling. We have tried using puff pastry, filo/spring roll pastry, even pastry made with vegetable suet! However, the best version (given below) uses a pastry made from coconut cream. This replaces the ghee or butter found in Indian recipes and produces an easy-to-roll version with a unique but subtle flavour of its own. You can use any filling you like, but do use a strong curry powder to avoid them being bland! serves 6-8 as a snack or starter
For the filling:
500g lamb mince
100g each of onion and frozen peas
200g each of carrot and potato
1 generous tbsp hot curry powder (try our madras or goan red)
1 tsp salt
Gently fry the lamb with the spices in a large heavy pan until the juices run and it is all browned.
Meanwhile finely dice the onion, carrot and potato.
Remove the meat from the pan with a slotted spoon and gently fry the onion. After 5 minutes add the lamb, carrot and potato, and cook for about 20 minutes, uncovered, until the mixture is cooked and quite dry. Add the salt and peas and leave to cool.
For the pastry:
250g plain flour
1/4 tsp salt
125g coconut cream
100ml approx water
Mix together the flour, salt and coconut until you have a breadcrumb mixture. Add sufficient water to bind it together and knead briefly, before chilling for half an hour.
Roll the pastry out to a thickness of maybe 2mm and use a cutter or plate to cut 8 circles about 10cm/4 inches in diameter.
Place a spoonful of the filling on one side and wet the rim of the circle before folding it over and crimping the edges together (see our photo).
Heat some oil in a wok and deep fry the puffs for a couple of minutes on each side. Alternatively, bake in the oven for 25 minutes at 180 degrees, or cook in your air-fryer, following the manufacturer’s instructions.
Serve with yoghurt, chilli sauce and mango chutney.
Cook’s notes
To make a vegan/vegetarian version, omit the lamb and add more diced potato and carrot.
For a chicken version, gently fry some chicken in your curry powder of choice and add some coconut cream. Cook until the sauce is reduced and not runny, otherwise it will ooze out of the pastry. Leave to cool, then chop the meat into very small pieces and continue as no: 3 above.
You can use half a block of coconut cream for the pastry if you like. Grate it into the flour as you would with suet, and add as much water as required to make the pastry stick together.