Peanut sauce III (pecel sauce)

Vegetarian friends come over for a visit today. Great food loving friends, who love Indonesian food especially. They have lived in Java for a while. I love to test some of Beb’s Vuyk sauces on them. As a main course I serve petjel/pecel: Indonesian salade. Together with this salad goes a peanut sauce. This sauce consists of onions, garlic, sambal trassie (shrimp paste), peanut butter and Kaempferia galanga (kencur).

This sauce is similar to a gado gado sauce. But a gado gado sauce is made with coconut milk and without kencur.

This Pecel sauce is enough for 4 people and ready in 15 minutes.

Peanut Sauce III #470 from Beb Vuyk’s Groot Indonesisch Kookboek, page 380.

Ingredients

1/2 jar of peanut butter
2 tablespoons of oil
water
1 tablespoon of vinegar

Spices

3 tablespoons of chopped onions
2 chopped cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of sambal terasi (shrimp paste with chili sauce)
3 tablespoons of tamarind paste
1 teaspoon of Javanese sugar
1/2 teaspoon Kaempferia galanga (kencur)
salt

Rub the Kaempferia galanga with the onion, garlic, chilli, sugar and salt to a paste. Saute in the oil until the onions are yellow. Add the peanut butter. Finish this sauce recipe as shown in 469.

The sauce is also called petjelsaus, because it’s served with Petjel (see Chapter ‘salads’).

I rub the onions in the mortar. You can use a food processor, but lately I use my cobek or tjobek more often. I think I’m better at it. Now it’s easier to use than a food processor, which needs a lot of cleaning.

To this sauce a pinch of Kaempferia galanga is added. A little bit of this root makes a big difference in the pecel sauce. As our visitors said: ‘That sauce smells like an Asian shop!’ Exactly, which can only be good. 😉

Sambal trassie or terasi is delicious with vegetables and certainly in a peanut sauce. My mother always uses only trassie in the sauce without sambal. That is also possible.

You rub onions, garlic and Kaempferia galanga with the sambal. I fry this paste into the pan where I make the peanut sauce in.

Now add 1/2 a jar of peanut butter to it. Strait into the pan, easy as that.  I bring some water to the boil  and pour it bit by bit carefully, in small amounts, on the peanut butter. Now keep stirring firmly.

The tamarind goes in now, in between the bits of water. We should finish this sauce like recipe 469 (Beb writes in her recipe book). The thickness of the sauce should be like a salad dressing. I keep adding water until it is. It goes fast.

Now your sauce is ready. It smells great. The kencur is great in it. Makes all the difference. Also the tamarind makes it nice and sour. Light and fresh even. You can use this sauce for everything. Any lightly cooked vegetable is great with it like cauliflower, broccoli, snow peas, cucumber, you name it.

Now I have to make an Indonesian salad: pecel. 😉