Vegetarian recipes from Malaysia

Meat-free Malaysian cooking is organised around rice, coconut milk and a pounded aromatic paste — shallot, garlic, ginger, galangal, lemongrass, dried chilli — fried until the oil separates out. vegetarian nasi lemak is the central example: rice cooked in coconut milk with a pandan leaf, served with sambal, cucumber and peanuts. vegetarian laksa shows the other route, noodles in broth, where the spice paste and coconut milk stand in for the usual fish stock, with firm tofu and bean sprouts.

Bread is not baked but hand-stretched and seared on a griddle: roti canai, kneaded, oiled, rested and then thrown out into a thin veil, is eaten at breakfast with dhal or a vegetable curry. Sweets rest on three constant materials — grated coconut, palm sugar, pandan — and on texture rather than cream: kuih ketayap is a green pancake rolled around a coconut and palm sugar filling, and cendol an iced dessert of rice flour strands in coconut milk.