Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, at the start of our Exceptional Egg week, as Jon, motivated by stay-at-home psychosis, increases post production by 50%. Three posts last week, three posts this week. How long can he keep this up? We’ll all learn together. Today’s dish is a simple but surprising and saucy sandwich, that if you wish to avoid learning too much about, you can skip straight to the recipe with thi s link. For everyone else, let’s make some bread!

A Name, And an Egg

Alright, I’m not going to lie to you all, at least a quarter of my interest in making this recipe Is in the pun potential. Roti, if you’re unaware, is literally just a word for “bread” in several languages, often referring to a specific style of bread. The version I am most familiar with is the Indian version (also known as chapatti), which is a whole-wheat flatbread. The best explanation for it is “the Indian version of a Tortilla” (literally, in Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish cookbook, her recipes use “roti, or whole wheat tortillas”) and it’s just as fundamental to a lot of Indian cuisine as tortillas are to Latin American cuisine. Like, Roti is the spoon in a lot of Indian cuisine: all those curries and sauced or spiced meats and vegetables are meant to be picked up with bread.

For this analogy, I need you to ignore the spoon in the picture.

So, this recipe’s name is just “Bread John”. And maybe you forgot because I only referenced it in the third person, but Jon is MY name. How did this dish end up with my name? IMPERIALISM. But let’s pump some quick breaks on that, just to revisit another reason we’re doing Egg week, and for me to offer an quick apology. Because the other reason I wanted to do a week on Egg based foods is because that’s the only kind of food my family doesn’t have to try very hard to get. You know, with the demons.

Their screeching wakes me in the morning.

Yeah, as I complained about a few weeks ago, the frustrating shortages at local stores have made shopping a little chaotic for the moment, but as of early March, my family is average 2-3 eggs a day thanks to our backyard screaming poop demons. By the way, if you, like so many others, are thinking about raising chickens to get free eggs like me, I have to warn you that you’re…probably too late to the game. Trust me, the initial investment in a coop, chicks, heat lamps, food, etc is NOT worth it so that, in SIX MONTHS, you can start getting “free” eggs. So I’m sorry that I wrote a week of posts relying on a food that I get much cheaper than other people (maybe. Like, if you extrapolated out the costs, I think we’re still paying a fair bit per dozen. Like, 3 to 4 bucks, all told? Maybe more.)

ANYWAY, let’s get back to Imperialism

Jack of the Isles

So, Roti John is a relatively new food that’s got a bit of a mystery for a history. Everyone vaguely agrees that in “Maritime Southeast Asia” (used to refer to the area even MORE south than say, Vietnam or Thailand, encompassing Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc) probably Singapore, sometime around the 60’s, someone tried something very dumb. They tried to order a hamburger from a street food vendor.

“Y’all got chicken nuggets?”

There’s some discussion on how much was conveyed from one party to the other, or how much was understood previously and I’m torn, because I think the results kind of indicate that some basics got through. Like, if you had to describe a hamburger, you’d say “a sandwich, with ground-up meat, some veggies, and sauce”. And that’s basically what a Roti John is. Hell, my version uses Ground Beef! The original recipe, it’s asserted, relied on mutton as the ground meat. But was that the guy doing the best with what he had to make a food he understood, or did he try and replicate the instructions/information he was given? It could go both ways: Singapore was under British administration/rule for roughly 124 years by the start of the 60’s (with a couple years where it had been seized by the Japanese) before joining with the surrounding nations to form Malaysia in 1963…and then getting kicked out of Malaysia to be its own thing in 1965. So it’s entirely possible that the vendor spoke a fair bit of English, or at least understood it. Which makes the name a little weird.

The name comes from the fact that “John” was, at the time, something Singaporeans would just call any foreigner, a little like how women are “Sheilas” in Australia, and other borderline racist placeholder names around the world. (You know, like how they want to show a business man is a jerk in a movie, so he snaps an ethnic name at a server or employee with a very different name?) The interesting detail there is that, supposedly, the Singaporeans learned that from the British, so it’s hard to know who was being weird. Anyway, supposedly t the hawker was either straight up naming the dish “John’s Bread”, to label it as a special dish for foreigners, or he was offering the sandwich and using the placeholder name for the customer: “please take this “bread” (sandwich), John”. The weird part is that most accounts insist that the sentence was uttered in Malay. Which… well, English is, and was, the de facto language of Singapore. Sure, plenty of people speak Malay there, but it’s slightly out of the ordinary. It’s like…look, I live in Washington state. About 10% of the population here speaks Spanish at home. That’s about the same as the population of at-home Malay speakers in Singapore. Now, that number used to be higher, but it’d be weird if there was a food invented by buying something from a Seattle food truck whose name was based on a sentence in Spanish. Like “Su chorizo, Juan”, becoming it’s own thing.

This just a random picture of food from a Seattle Food truck.
Though, now that I’ve written it, “Su chorizo” sounds like “sugo riso” which is Italian for “Rice sauce”.
I don’t know what to do with this information.

Some stories explain that the vendor himself was Malay, which would at least make sense. I don’t know, there’s something ever so slightly untidy about the explanation. Which I guess fits, because the sandwich is untidy, which is my abrupt way of saying “we’re seguing away from this for now”.

Seared, Slapped, Sauced, Sorted

Now, the Roti John recipe I used is a modification of one I saw on SortedFood’s Singapore battle. And it’s fairly simple, so let’s get started. First, you make the veg. Which is just some diced up onion, green pepper, and minced garlic.

Nothing too special here.

The original recipe calls for a green chili as well (to specify that they mean a spicy pepper, rather than a green bell pepper) but I didn’t have any, so I replaced it with some red pepper flakes (also, my mother and brother aren’t the fans of spicy food that I am, so I wanted to play it a little safe) Soften those suckers up in a high-temp oil like peanut or vegetable for 10 minutes, and then dump them into a bowl for a couple of minutes while you work on the next step: really browning some beef.

This is a thing I used to complain about a lot on the site, but a LOT of home cooks don’t actually “brown” their beef when they cook it, they just…make it grey. By which I mean that properly browning beef requires high heat, and space so the beef doesn’t steam in its own juices. You’re essentially searing the ground beef like you would a steak, so you’re looking for that dark color and craggly texture. This recipe specifically calls for you to NOT TOUCH your ground beef for extended periods to help that form.

See that darkness? That’s what we need.

We’re talking “browning this beef will take like, 10-15 minutes, and you’ll be letting it sit without touching for 3-5 minutes at a time.” Just trust it. Once the beef is browned, you toss the veggies back in, and still in some spices. Predominantly a tablespoon of curry powder, and a pinch of salt. Stir it all together, and let the curry powder wake up a little by cooking for another 4-5 minutes.

Next comes the weird part for most of the American cooks I know: the omelette. It’s actually very simple, but not something we typically do. See, you’re going to combine most of the beef and veggie mixture with some eggs. But not IN the pan, quite yet. No, you’re going to save ¼ cup of the mixture for topping, and then dump the rest of the mixture into a bowl of whisked eggs. (This constant “in the pan, out of the pan” motion is actually really good evidence that this was invented by a street-food vendor, as this is pretty classic technique for that.) Then, you’re going to spread your egg, beef, and veggie mixture on sliced baguette. Yes, BEFORE cooking the egg.

Just slap that sludge on.

This is actually a not-uncommon technique in Asian dishes (And I’m sure some other cultures have it as well, but the examples I know are all Asian): the idea is that, by letting the egg soak into the bread a little, you A: soften the bread a little, and B: adhere the omelette to the bread as it cooks. This is also sometimes used for Jianbing, a Chinese breakfast crepe that…I just had an idea about, but we’ll get back to that later. You can also see it done with Omelette sandwiches in India, where you can see this cool system of “start cooking the omelette, add the bread, flip, and fold” that’s pretty cool to watch.

Then you just slap the wet egg and bread down on the hot skillet to cook. If you put the two halves of the baguette close enough, the egg will connect.

This piece DID, until I flipped it, and the egg tore.

Cook it for a couple minutes until the egg is cooked, flip it over to get a little toasting of the bread itself, and then take off the heat and finish.

How exactly you serve this is kind of up to you. Actually, a LOT of the steps are up to you. I used ground beef, but as I mentioned, the initial recipe used Mutton, and you get it with Tuna, Chicken, Shrimp, probably whatever protein you want. Typically, it would be finished with a couple sauces: specifically, sambal or ketchup, and mayo. (again, the idea that this comes with ketchup and mayo is one of the things that makes me think that the IDEA of a hamburger was at least kind of understood). You can add other sauces that you like to it. And then you can add sliced green onion, maybe some sprigs of cilantro. I’ve seen it topped with French fries, you can add traditional burger toppings like lettuce and tomato, or cheese, you just need the basics: a meat and veggie omelette cooked ON the bread, and served warm.

It’s visually quite impressive.

And the results were perfectly fine. Nate objected to saucing the outside of the sandwich, because he’s a fastidious old man, but the honestly worst part about the process was that our baguette was a day past its prime, and therefore a little too crunchy. I found that the sandwich really benefitted from the ketchup in particular: the inside filling wasn’t too spicy at all, but more a kind of a consistent warm and savory mix, and a bit of sweeter acidity paired really nicely with it. I pretty heartily endorse the sandwich as something to try, though I think it’d be easier to cook it in like, hoagie rolls, rather than having to slice up a baguette like I did.

WEDNESDAY: EGG SALAD FOUR WAYS. AND AT LEAST ONE OF THEM IS GOOD!

FRIDAY: EGG ROLLS, BECAUSE IF I LEARNED TO COOK A NEW TYPE OF SANDWICH JUST TO MAKE A PUN OFF MY OWN NAME, YOU CAN BE DAMN SURE I WAS GOING TO INCLUDE EGG ROLLS IN EGG WEEK.

Welcome to the

Recipe

Roti John, Sorted-style

Serves 2-4

Ingredients

1 tbsp vegetable or peanut oil, plus additional

1 small onion, diced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 green bell pepper, diced

1 tbsp red pepper flakes, or more to taste

½ pound ground beef

1 tbsp curry powder

4 eggs

2 small baguettes, or 2 hoagie rolls

1 tbsp butter

Toppings of your choice: ketchup, green onion, cilantro, sambal, mayo, etc

Preparation

Heat the oil in a frying pan or skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion, garlic, bell pepper, and red pepper flakes, cooking for 10 minutes until vegetables are softened. Remove from the skillet to a medium bowl.
Wipe out the pan, add a little more oil, and increase the heat to high. Add the beef, and still VERY infrequently, maybe once per minute, to allow to really brown. Once meat IS brown (around 10-15 minutes), add the vegetables back in, and add the curry powder. Stir, and cook another couple minutes to incorporate the flavors. Remove to the bowl, and let cool 5 minutes before adding to eggs.
In a large bowl, whisk the eggs before adding all but ¼ cup of beef mixture and stirring to combine. Open your baguette or hoagie rolls, and spoon egg mixture onto both halves. You should use all the mixture on the 2 sandwiches.
Wipe out the pan, and add the butter. Let it melt and foam up, before slapping the bread, egg-side down, and letting fry for 2 minutes, until egg starts to brown. Flip the sandwich, letting the tops of the bread toast for another minute or so. Move to a plate, top as desired.