Happy Chinese New Year. I’m sure some of you have one or two (or three) boxes of pre-cooked tikoy at home. For years, my Mama only cooked it one way – dipped in egg and then fried. I’ve always been curious about the instructions on the back of the package: Cut into serving pieces. Wrap in lumpia wrapper or simply dip in beaten egg and/ plain flour. Lumpia wrapper? Flour? Okay, let’s do that.
Recently, I’ve heard and read that there were other ways of preparing pre-cooked tikoy – from steaming, popping the tikoy in the microwave, and making nutella tikoy sandwich.
Tikoy should be kept refrigerated, but if you can’t wait, cut it using a knife coated in oil.
Today, I’m using Eng Bee Tin Brown tikoy. A gift. This particular variant was sweet and had a really strong vanilla flavor. And I will put Nutella on every single variant.
Steamed
I steamed one huge chunk of plain tikoy and one 3 layered nutella. Steamed for 5 minutes and that’s it. I think I should have just steamed it in 3. It was too gooey. But the steamed triple decker nutella tikoy sandwich was heavenly! I needed to scoop it out with a fork from the steamer though. A bit messy when taking it out of the steamer, but once it cools down a bit, it’s great!
I’d recommend steaming tikoy in big chunks for ease when taking it off the steamer.
Fried with Egg
This is how I ate tikoy growing up. Slices of tikoy dipped in egg and fried. The way we do it at home is heat up the pan in medium heat with a little bit of oil. When the pan is heated, turn the heat to low and start frying.
Remember that you are frying twice the thickness when doing a Nutella sandwich, so fry it a bit longer than the regular ones. The crunchiness of the egg plus the strong vanilla taste, actually goes well with Nutella. I liked it!
Fried with Flour
Same with how you fry tikoy in egg, you just swap it out with flour and that’s that. Make sure to coat the tikoy lightly with flour, otherwise it’ll be hard to chew. Of course I tried doing a Nutella tikoy sandwich. Of course.
The thing about frying it in flour is that when it cools down, it becomes crunchy. Some people like the crunch, I don’t.
All in all, frying it in oil dipped with egg works for me the best. Try all three and find out your preference.
I’m too full and I still have a lot of tikoy left. Tikoy on lumpia wrapper, I will see you tomorrow.
