Monday, July 14, 2008

Dumbo in the Kitchen - #1: Pita with Homemade Pork Patties

Forget McDonald's and KFC. Make your own patties and satisfy your fast food cravings at home.

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I'm not a precise cook, so I'll just roughly point out what I bought and put into the mix:

600g minced meat (I used pork, but you could substitute with any other meat, including poultry)
16 pcs (slightly more or less depending on how much of a "meat-person" you are) of Jacob's high-fibre crackers (pounded into powder)
5 or 6 eggs (enough to make a not-so-wet dough out of the above two ingredients)
soy sauce (1/3 cup, I think) or salt to taste (or a combination of both)
black pepper to taste

Mix these into a pliable dough (can you call a dough "pliable"?), which is then divided and pressed into 1/2 cm-thick patties just a bit smaller in diameter than your pita bread. Fry these patties on a pan (on medium flame) with whatever amount of oil you can allow yourself to indulge in, till cooked inside and golden outside (I know this kind of instructions are rather vague; but you should not be in the kitchen if you can't judge if something is cooked). Use butter if you wan't extra creaminess. Use olive oil if you want to appease your conscience a bit. :-)

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You can buy pita bread from most hypermarkets these days.

Cut the pita bread into halves, and bake them to moderate crispness (if too crispy, they crumble as you try to stuff things in). Bread toaster on low heat does the trick just nice (and faster and easier than using an oven).

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You should also get some lettuces, tomatoes and a cucumber. Slice them thinly. For extra punch, I also bought some coriander. But you can leave this out if you don't have a fancy for it (not many people do; but it's a favorite ingredient in Teochew and Thai cuisines).

For the sauce, mixed up some mayonnaise, tomato ketchup and chili sauce, in roughtly 7:2:1 ratio. Replace chili sauce with mustard if available.

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Next? What do you mean "next"? Just stuff those ingredients (patties smeared generously with the special sauce, a huge leaf of lettuce, a few slices of tomato and cucumber, and a bunch of chopped coriander) into the toasted pitas and eat up!


By the way, I forgot to put the lettuces into the picture above.

The picture below shows what it looked like just before landing inside my mouth. Yum!


Salivate, man, salivate...

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