Muhallebi with Soy Caramel: Rebuilding Our Dessert Game

Desserts were the part of Habibi-san that people used to skip in their write-ups. Not attack — skip. Reviewers of the Haji Lane years would spend four paragraphs on the charcoal and then finish with a sentence about pudding that read like a polite cough. We have read all of it. There is no version of this post where we pretend that did not happen.

So this is not a post claiming our desserts were always excellent. It is a post about what changed, starting with the one that gets ordered most: muhallebi — vanilla & yoghurt milk pudding, morello cherries in kirsch, yamasa soy caramel, brown butter digestive biscuit.

A pudding is a texture problem before it is a flavour problem

Muhallebi is a milk pudding set with starch. That is the whole definition, and it is the reason the dish is hard. A crème caramel or a baked custard sets with egg, which means protein coagulates into a mesh and holds everything else in place. Starch does not coagulate. It swells, it gels, and then over hours it slowly lets go of some of the water it was holding — the same reason a cornflour sauce goes weepy in the fridge overnight.

That gives a starch-set pudding a short window in which it is exactly right, and a texture that has to be judged by the spoonful rather than measured. It is also why every other element on our line is doing structural work rather than decoration. Once you see the dish that way, the plate stops looking like a pudding with three garnishes and starts looking like four answers to one problem.

The yoghurt is the first correction

Our menu line says vanilla & yoghurt milk pudding, and the yoghurt is not there as a health note. Acid tightens dairy. It also changes the way sweetness lands: a plain sweetened milk set is flat through the middle of the mouth, pleasant and slightly boring, and it needs something to push against. Yoghurt gives it a floor of sourness that the sugar has to climb over.

We strain our own yoghurt in this kitchen for the mezze board, so this is a thing we are already set up to think about. The labne on the savoury side is the same principle used for the opposite purpose — there, straining concentrates the sourness so the dip has the body to hold a garnish on its surface; here, a smaller dose of that same sourness stops a sweet set from being cloying.

Soy caramel is not salted caramel

Every kitchen knows that caramel needs a corrective. Cook sugar past amber and you get a real bitterness, and the standard fix is salt. Salted caramel works because sodium suppresses the perception of bitterness, so the burnt notes read as depth rather than as a mistake.

Soy does that job and then keeps going. It is salty, so it performs the same suppression. But it is also a fermented product, which means it arrives carrying free glutamate and a set of aromatic compounds produced by months of slow browning in a vat rather than minutes of fast browning in a pan. Put it into caramel and you are not seasoning the caramel, you are extending it in the direction it was already travelling. The line names yamasa because the brewer changes the result; soy sauce is no more a commodity ingredient than olive oil is.

This is the same instinct that runs through the savoury half of the menu, where kombu dashi goes into the matbucha for reasons that have nothing to do with making it taste Japanese. It is the cheapest honest way to describe how this kitchen works: reach for the ingredient that pushes an existing flavour further, not the one that adds a second flavour on top of it.

Cherries in a spirit made from cherries

Morello cherries are sour cherries, a different species from the sweet ones you eat out of a bag, and they keep their acidity through cooking and preserving instead of collapsing into jam. Kirsch is a clear spirit distilled from cherries. So the fruit on this plate is sitting in alcohol made from its own family, which is a tidy piece of European kitchen logic several centuries older than anything else on our menu.

Practically, the cherries are the third corrective. Acid from the yoghurt, salt and savouriness from the soy, then acid plus alcohol from the fruit. Alcohol is volatile, so it carries aroma up off the plate and into your nose in a way a syrup cannot. It also, plainly, means this dessert contains alcohol. If that matters to you, say so when you order — the same goes for the kirsch as for anything else on the list.

The biscuit is the floor

A soft thing needs a hard thing. Nobody invented that rule; it is the reason cheesecake has a base and trifle has sponge. What is worth noticing is the specific choice here: a brown butter digestive biscuit, crumbled, rather than a pastry case.

A case would have to survive contact with a pudding that slowly releases water. Crumb does not have that problem. It goes on at the last moment and it is allowed to soften. And brown butter puts the biscuit in the same family as the caramel and the soy, because browning butter is browning milk solids. Three components on this plate have been browned by three different routes: sugar in a pan, milk solids in a pan, and soybeans in a fermentation vat. That is the flavour spine of the dish, and none of it comes from chocolate.

So is it good now?

We are not going to award ourselves a rosette for it. What we will say is that the dessert menu is now built the way the savoury menu is: one clear technique per plate, an argument for every ingredient on the line, and nothing on there because a dessert section has to exist. The other two are the chocolate kataifi tart, which is a lesson in what pastry can and cannot hold, and the matcha-misu, which keeps the coffee that most matcha tiramisus throw away. The small salty thing that closes the loop back to the fire is the smoked olives.

If you want the honest version of how the whole kitchen got rebuilt rather than just the sweet end of it, that is five years of Habibi-san. What reviewers actually order, in their pattern rather than ours, is here. And if you are working out what an evening costs before you commit, we wrote that down too.

How to order it

Muhallebi is the dessert for a mezze-heavy table — after the hummus, the dips and something off the fire, when nobody wants another rich thing but everybody still wants a spoon. It is cold, it is set, and it is the least heavy way to finish a meal that started with charcoal.

Our Haji Lane sibling, Li’l Habibi, ends its nights differently: a seasonal fruit tart with sumac pastry cream, and a pistachio Basque cheesecake. Same family, different fire, different sweet ending.

The full list is on the menu, the room and the fire are in the gallery, and the practical questions — pork, alcohol, dietary notes, booking — are answered in our FAQ. We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Book a table.