Indonesian Peanut Sauce (Bumbu Gado-gado) Recipe

The Indonesian peanut sauce (sambal kacang) is commonly used for the famous Gado-Gado salad and its different varieties and for Chicken Satay. 

I saw some recipes online that uses only peanut butter. Rubbish! The real Indonesian peanut sauce uses proper peanuts, and grind them as soft or as coarse as you like.

You can add peanut butter to make the sauce creamy, but use real peanut as the main ingredient. Easiest is to use supermarket's basic salted peanut. You can rinse the salt to be healthy, or just use the peanut as salty (instead of adding the salt into the sauce later).

As most Indonesian recipes, precise measurements are not important. But as a guidelines, I wrote the measurements for those of you who never tried this before. You can always add more peanut

Ingredients:

200gr (ish) Basic salted peanut

2 little Shallots or 1 banana shallot 

2 cloves Garlic

Red chilli and/or Bird eye chilli as needed

Salt & pepper to taste

100ml (ish) Hot/warm water 

Optional: 

1tbs peanut butter or 1tbs coconut milk

1 tsp brown sugar 

1tbs Tamarind water and/or lemon/lime

Sweet soya sauce

Method A: Mix everything in a food processor or blender, add salt and pepper to taste. 

Or, Method B: grind the shallot, garlic, chilli, and peanuts using mortar and pestle, adding water slowly. This is the authentic Gado-gado street seller method... if you do this, you have to add some sexy hip gyrating movement to make it taste nice! (Not making sense? That's the point, the Indonesian way...hahaha...)

Both Gado-gado and Satay are normally served with rice cake (lontong). You can make this by boiling 'boil in the bag' rice for one to two hours. Then press the bulging bag with something heavy. Once it's cooler, refrigerate until firm - two hours to overnight. To serve, cut the rice cake into bite size (about one inch cube).

To make gado-gado, mix any vegetable you like with a hard boiled egg, fried tofu, fried tempe, and rice cake, then pour the peanut sauce. On top you can add lemon/lime juice, sweet soya sauce, fried shallot (bawang goreng) and crackers (krupuk) as garnish.

The traditional Indonesian or Javanese gado-gado has long/fine green beans, bean sprouts, sweet corn, some green leaves (pak choy or its family). Sometimes they have bitter gourd (pare). Still, you can use any vegetable you like. I sometimes used mixed salad leaves, kale, frozen mixed veg, etc.

Another version of this delicious and nutricious salad is the Sundanese Karedok. Same mix of vegetable, but most veg are raw. And if you want to be authentic, add Kaempferia galanga (kencur) to the sauce to give it the extra Sundanese kick.

Native Jakartan or Betawi people have yet another version of Gado-gado. It is called Ketoprak. In this version, the only vegetable is bean sprout. The rest are rice cake, rice vermicelli (bihun), fried tofu and sometimes hard boiled egg.