Malaysian halal recipes

Malaysian food brings together Malay, Chinese and Indian cooking, and the Malay kitchen at its heart is built on coconut, chilli, lemongrass and sambal, the chilli paste that sits on the side of nearly every plate. Malaysia is a Muslim-majority country, so many of its hawker classics are already cooked halal at home.

Our Malaysian recipes include nasi lemak, coconut rice with sambal and anchovies that many count as the national dish, roti canai, a flaky flatbread torn and dipped in curry, and laksa, a spiced noodle soup. There is char kway teow, flat rice noodles fried hard with seafood, mee goreng, ayam percik, chicken grilled with a spiced coconut baste, rendang tok, a dry beef rendang cooked until the sauce clings, and Hainanese chicken rice.

Next to them are quick plates that use sambal as the shortcut: sambal egg fried rice, sambal chicken in lettuce cups, sambal prawns with peppers and spinach, and a chilli and garlic tofu bowl with broccoli. Most take under twenty minutes.

Each recipe gives its calories, protein, carbs, fat and fibre per serving, worked out from its ingredients. How we work out our numbers