Mont Si Kyaw - Burmese Oil-Fried Pancakes

Mont Si Kyaw (literally “snack oil-fried”) is a sweet, sticky rice pancake flavoured with toddy palm jaggery (htanyet), peanuts, sesame and coconut, that’s chewy in the middle but crisp on the edges. It’s eaten throughout the year, but especially at the Waso festival (Vassa) of which the full moon is today. See, the Burmese eat pancakes for their Lent too!

The pancake is also central to the Burmese version of the story of King Chandragupta, a little like King Alfred burning the cakes.

In the story, King Chandragupta was defeated in battle and, exhausted and alone, he ended up at a Mont Si Kyaw stall in a remote village where nobody recognised him.

As the King sat in misery and ate his mont si kyaw by picking at it from the centre, the stallholder scolded him thus: “Why are you eating your mont si kyaw like Chandragupta fighting his battles?”

Seeing his startled face, the woman went on to say: “No wonder the King keeps losing, because instead of taking the countryside and the grain first and moving in bit by bit, he just keeps laying siege to the city.”

And thus, as the story goes, the proud king learnt a valuable lesson in military tactics from a humble village-woman.

Anyway, please do try my recipe for mont si kyaw, especially if you too enjoy tales of royalty being schooled by the working-class.

Mont Si Kyaw (Burmese Oil-Fried Pancakes)

100g glutinous rice flour
50g rice flour
100g brown sugar/coconut sugar/jaggery/palm sugar
250ml water
20g salted peanuts
10g sesame seeds
25g shredded coconut
Vegetable oil for frying

Mix the flours together with the sugar in a large bowl. Slowly drizzle in the water while whisking to form a thin batter. Add the peanuts, sesame and coconut and mix again. Set the pancake batter to one side.

Heat a 1cm depth of oil in a 20cm diameter frying pan on a medium-high heat. When you feel waves of heat rising from the pan with the palm of your hand, scoop up a ladle full of batter, making sure to include some peanuts, sesame and coconut. Pour the ladle of batter evenly into the hot oil so it fills the bottom of the pan and forms a pancake.

Let the pancake sizzle and firm up for 5 minutes till it goes a little crisp around the edges and then use tongs or chopsticks to gently flip the pancake in the oil to fry the other side. After another 5 minutes, remove the pancake and drain on kitchen paper. You should be able to make 4 or 5 pancakes this way.

When all the mont si kyaw is made, snip them into pieces and they’re ready to eat. You can also keep them in a Tupperware for a couple of days, though they will lose their crispness.