Group 3 Food Blog!: Traditional Singaporean snacks

What's life without good food?

These traditional snacks are some of the many food items Singaporeans have as breakfast or during tea-time breaks. However, with the emergence of packet snacks on the shelf of supermarkets, these snacks are now more common among the older generation.

From left:
Muah Chee, Chwee Kueh, Curry Puff, Mee Jian Kueh

The Malays and Peranakans in Singapore often make elaborate and tedious kuehs and desserts to entertain guests. These Kuehs are often colourful and vary in form or flavours even though the ingredients that go into making the kuehs can be similar.

Kuehs

Kuehs are bite-sized snacks or desserts commonly found in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. It refers to cakes, cookies, dumplings, puddings or pastries in English and are usually made from rice or glutinous rice.

Kuehs are more often steamed rather than baked and thus vary in texture, flavor and appearance from Western cakes or puff pastries. Kuehs are mostly sweet but some kuehs are savoury.

Kueh Lapis Sagu

Food falls into 3 categories:

Food that is tasty.
Food that is a feast for the eyes.
Food that taste great because you grew up having them.

The kueh lapis sagu ticks all the boxes. Kueh lapis sagu is a steamed multi-coloured Nyonya Kueh that is also known as the 9 layer cake. Made from glutinous rice flour, coconut and sugar, the kueh lapis sagu is tedious to make as the kueh is made layer by layer. Many people love to peel the layers one by one instead of eating the kueh as a whole.

Ondeh Ondeh

Ondeh-ondeh are green coloured balls made with a combination of glutinous rice flour and tapioca flour. The colour of the balls come from the pandan green flavouring that is mixed into the dough. Coated with either fresh grated coconut or desiccated coconut, they were like little sweet bombs. A bite into an Ondeh ondeh and you would have the liquid gula melaka(brown sugar) oozing out in your mouth.

To know how to make Ondeh-ondeh, watch this video!