rojak Popular hawker dish. Rojak is typically a tossed salad of various ingredients. Different ethnic groups have different versions of the dish. The Chinese cut up pineapple, cucumbers, turnips, bean sprouts and youtiao (dough fritters), and toss them with a sauce made of chilli, tamarind, lime and lime peel, and a prawn paste. The mixture is then topped with crushed roasted peanuts. The Malay version is similar except that it contains tempeh (a patty made from cooked, fermented soya beans) and tahu goreng (fried bean curd). With Indian rojak, customers choose which specific ingredients they would like in their dish; these might include boiled diced potatoes, hard- boiled eggs, fried bean curd, vadai (fried dough with a chilli or prawn embedded in it) and fried squid, all served with a sweet chilli sauce.

Rojak has its origins in Indonesia where it is called ‘rujak’. A popular dish in east Java is rujak cingur which is similar to the Malay version of Singapore rojak except that it has a distinctive ingredient, cartilage from the nose of an ox (cingur).

The word ‘rojak’ has entered Singapore English to mean ‘mix’.

Photo credit: Singapore Press Holdings/ The Straits Times