How to Make Tebaloi Have you heard about a food called as Tebaloi?

If you are not from The Land of Hornbill or Sarawak, surely you have no idea about it at all. Tebaloi is a kind of food that is synonymous with Melanau ethnic of Sarawak. It is some sort of a cracker made from sago powder in the shredded form. Tebaloi is one of my favourite food, but I never knew how the process of making it until I joined a visit to one of the places of making this food somewhere in Mukah, Sarawak when I was in Form 5 back then. Actually, there are two ways of making Tebaloi: traditional method or modern method. The factory that I went before is a traditional one, so I will explain details about how to make Tebaloi by using the traditional method. Relatively, the process of making Tebaloi start in the blender machine. The first and foremost step in making Tebaloi is to mix the ingredients in order to make the dough. The ingredients needed are shredded coconut, sago flour, sugar, eggs, banana leaf and the flavour. The flavour can be chocolate or any other flavour depends on which flavour that you preferred. The process of making the dough using the blender machine takes about five to ten minutes and makes sure that the dough is well-mixed. Then, this so call dough will go on to the next phase whereby you will have to grind the dough uniformly on a banana leaf to get the nice thin form of the cracker. Banana leaf is used because of it is suitable to create the texture of Tebaloi while bottle is use to grind the dough on the leaf. After that, put the dough that you just grind aside for a few minutes before start the baking process. Actually, you can use a grinder instead of using bottle. This is a traditional method after all. Bottle is used to keep the original way of grinding the dough that has been practiced from generations to generations. The next step is the baking process step. Bake it over a traditional style oven. During the trip last time, I realized that they have mangrove wood as fuel. I believe that the wood gives a very stable and consistent heat as it burns away. This is the first baking phase. Optionally, you can use your modern oven for this step. What I explained on using traditional style of oven just now is based on what I saw during the trip. I guess using the traditional or modern oven gives a different taste of the Tebaloi. If you use the modern oven, bake this dough in about 15 to 20 minutes at a temperature of 150 degrees Celsius. Make sure that you put the dough in the oven together with the banana leaf to get the aroma from the banana leaf itself.

During the half way through the baking process, take the Tebaloi out of the oven for cutting. At this stage, the Tebaloi is still half-baked but manageable. Then, cut it into small pieces about the size of an A5 paper. Actually, this is for marketing purpose and to make it easier for you to eat it then. After that, the Tebaloi will go through its final baking process. This is where it gets the crunch. Actually, it is more like smoked not baked. This process is done by placing the pieces of the Tebaloi on wire gauze. The wire gauze is like one the apparatus that we use when doing a heating experiment in the chemistry laboratory but the one that I mentioned here is a bigger one. On the other hand, in modern factories, they have a huge electric baking oven to bake the Tebaloi to perfection. They use production line concept to mass produce the Tebaloi. The taste might be the same, but you will not smell the smoke on the Tebaloi then. Rather than smoking the Tebaloi using the traditional method, you can put it in the oven under a temperature of 150 degrees Celsius. Lastly, the finish product is weight and packaged thus they are ready to be shipped out. In conclusion, the process of making Tebaloi is not that hard. For those who are adventurous enough, they can try to make it themselves like making homemade cookies. You will not regret it since the Tebaloi is really delicious and hard to find if you are not in Sarawak.