Tuesday 3 February 2015

A Traitional CNY Snack in my Husband's Family - Khnaut Khnaut

It is the time of the year when everyone gets busy baking all the Chinese New Year goodies & I can't escape it either. I love to cook and bake, so this year I took on the task to bake Pineapple Tarts, Kueh Bangkit & Khnaut Khnaut.

Well the last CNY goodie - Khnaut Khnaut is an unknown snack in Singapore. It is a snack the old folks back in Terengganu made for Chinese New Year.


A little background, my in laws are Nyonya from Terengganu. Thus they have cooked dishes that are unknown or hardly found in Singapore. I am starting to learn one by one from her.


My in laws have migrated to Singapore for more than 5 decades and now my mom in law is in her 90s. So she cannot show me how to prepare the dishes, she can only tell me what ingredients to put and do this and that. But never the proportion of the ingredient *sobsob*, so I have to trial and error to have the taste right. Plus I don't quite understand her dialect, sometimes I need my husband to translate certain words she used.


Back in the old days, people in Terengganu were not exposed to much external influence and thus the Nyonya created this snack. No one truly know the origins. Maybe I should ask my mom in law this weekend.


This CNY goodie is harder and crispy in nature and has an acquired taste which not many appreciate.

So don't worry when yours turn out to be harder than biscuits cos it is meant to be hard and crispy to chew!
So now for the mysterious Khnaut Khnaut,

Ingredients

  • 800g Flour
  • 200g Glutinous Rice Flour
  • 10 eggs
  • 6 to 8 Tbsp of Icing Sugar (depends on your sweetness level)
  • 1 tsp of salt
Directions
1. Sieve the flour and glutinous rice four together. Mix well. Set aside.
2. Add the icing sugar into the eggs and beat well.
3. Combine the egg mixture into the flour mixture. Knead.
4. Knead till the dough doesn't stick to the hands. 
5. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes.
6. Roll out the dough till as thin as possible. *We rolled the dough to a thickness of 0.01mm. 
7. Flour the dough and cut the rolled out dough into irregular shapes using a knife. *My husband & I used kueh bangkit mould to cut. 

8. Deep fry them in a wok of oil. Once they turn gold, sieve them out and leave them on the grease paper.
9. Once cool, store them in air tight containers. 


Notes:
  1. We used self raising flour instead of flour and we had a hard time knead the dough. So we advise all to use normal flour.
  2. Back in those days, they cooked a sugar syrup to coat the Khnaut Khnaut. 

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