Indonesian Culinary - Martabak

There is such kind of food in Indonesian culinary which is called as martabak. When you say about martabak in Indonesia, it could be salty/savoury martabak and sweet martabak. Although they have slightly different ingredient and shape, we still call them martabak. In Indonesia, martabak is one of most popular street food.

Salty martabak, others mentioned it as murtabak, mutabbaq, originally came from Yemen and Saudi Arabia. It is also commonly found in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand. The name of mutabbaq in Arabic means 'folded'. In Indonesia it called martabak malabar, martabak mesir, and martabak asin.

The salty/savioury one contain egg, meat, garlic, onion. The sweet one, Indonesian people called it 'martabak manis' or 'kue terang bulan (bright moon cake), martabak Bandung. The cooking method and ingedients are different, martabak manis using dough (flour which also use yeast and baking soda). The dough is back on circle shaped pan, and than after couple minutes, margarine, sugar, crushed peanuts, chocolate and cheese are spreading into martabak and then it is folded in half. So the topping of martabak manis is in the middle.

Nowaday, there are many variety of martabak manis. The topping is vary, also the dough. Martabak become most popular food, especially in Bandung where the culinary always invent new and creative one. In Bandung, Kedai Martabak Tropica, introduce new style of martabak manis. Here we can choose your own martabak dough whether it will be original one, pandan flavour, red velvel flavour or green tea flavour. So does the topping of martabak. There are a lot of choice of topping, from original one (crushed peanut, chocolate, cheese), until the modern style such as using green tea, cakalang fish, ovomaltine, nutella, toblerone, durian, kit kat, oreo, hersey's and other. Cakalang martabak is a special recipe from master of Indonesian culinary, Bondan Winarno which made it only for Kedai Martabak Tropica Bandung. Well, it kinda a special taste when savoury meet the sweet in one plate of sweet martabak. Cakalang is kind of fish, commonly found in Sulawesi, part of East of Indonesia. Cakalang fish flake is cooked with some ingredients which resulted savoury taste. It a great taste I think. I really want to taste Cakalang Martabak when come to Bandung.

You can choose you own style of martabak whether you want it as original with variety topping, you want it as pizza martabak, you want is as 10 topping martabak or you want the dough become thin and cripsy martabak ... just choose your own.

Visit this link to know more about the best martabak in Bandung. The city of fashion and culinary.

Note: all photos taken from instagram of kedai martabak Bandung, @kedaimartabaktropica.bandung