Chinese Pancake - In Singlish Mee Jiang Kueh

Mee Jiang Kueh. A true Singaporean food to me. A traditional snack that dates back to 1960s... as far as I can remember.... cannot remember further, cause I was born in the 1960s... LOL.

In 1970s, on some weekends, my late mum would pass me some money from her "zhao ti gu" for our weekend treats.  Her little income from being a illegal hawker selling home grown papaya, chilli padi or lime or lemon grown from home.
My brother and me will walk one and a quarter mile to this old Punggol wet market located at 8 mile to get our treats. Usually we will be dispatched to get mee jiang kueh from a stall opposite the market, next to a lane that leads to a cinema. I can vividly remember a roll of 6" (I think) pancake pans, at least 5 of them turning up and down churning out pans and pans of mee jiang kueh. Peanut or coconut, we will place our order and wait to collect them to return home. This is the kind of pancake we know in our days. We were not exposed to the plain pancake like the Macdonald's ones yet.
Funny how at that time, I was not a fan of Mee Jiang Kueh. My favourite is the layered multi-coloured noya kueh.
Going forward, when I got older and good Mee Jiang Kueh is difficult to find, I started to appreciate this nostalgic food. 

How I started making mee jiang kueh.

By chance, in 2014, a chef passed us "a make from scratch western pan cake recipe" to run a stall selling western pan cake to raise fun for charity purpose. As the chef did not give us the step by step guide on how to make it, one of my friend sat in front of a stall to watch how a pancake was made. 3 of us started to experiment on how to get the pan cake taste good. At that time, the pan cake taste exactly like the western ones, soft and that is it. We were able to add kaya and peanut mix to make it taste better. So to say, it was a sold out for us.

The improved version came about when I ran out of ingredients and made do with what I have at home. I did some math calculation on the baking agents and it ended up with a better pancake and thus my own product was born. I did some adjustments on my subsequent attempt to get this final result/recipe.

Recording my story here, is a good way for anyone to understand the culture of this food and how I come out with this recipe. To me, this recipe hold lots of memories for me. Hope you treasure this recipe as I did and share it to those who love it. 

Finally if you are updating your own social media on what you have learnt from my recipe, do add my link to your blog, so that I am able to share my story with them.

Check out my Mee Jiang Kueh recipe here.