Dry-fried shrimp dish
This dry-fried shrimp dish is one of those Beb Vuyk recipes where you think (if you only read it): ‘This is nothing special’. But when you taste it, you are surprised by how delicious it is. The ingredients are simple.
Dry-fried shrimp #253
Translated from Beb Vuyk’s Groot Indonesisch Kookboek, page 222.
Goreng Oedang Kering
Ingredients
- 100 grams cooked shrimp
- 100 grams coconut flour (Beb means grated coconut)
- 3 tablespoons oil
Spices
- 5 tablespoons chopped onions
- 2 chopped garlic cloves
- 1 tablespoon tamarind water, made with a piece of tamarind the size of half a walnut
- pepper
- Roast the coconut flour in a thick-bottomed pan until it is yellow-brown in color.
- Sauté the onions and garlic in the oil.
- Once they are golden brown, remove half of them.
- Add the shrimp and tamarind water to the remaining mixture.
- Cook until the mixture is dry.
- Mix in the coconut flour and pepper.
- Cook these together for a little longer.
- Serve sprinkled with the leftover onions and garlic.
Just look at these super easy ingredients. I get cocktail shrimp from the supermarket. Asem is tamarind. I use tamarind from a jar (already filtered) and mix a tablespoon with some water. I grind the onions and garlic in the food processor.
To roast the coconut (briefly in a pan without oil or anything), keep stirring until the color changes into this beautiful sunny sheen. I then sauté the onions and garlic in the same pan with some oil. I don’t add any salt here, because the shrimp are already very salty.
Now that the onions are ready, I scoop out a portion of them, as Beb suggests, and save them for garnish. The shrimp can go into the pan, along with the tamarind and the rest of the onions. I let this dry-fry by stirring regularly over medium-high heat with the tamarind.
It takes a while, but at a certain point all the moisture is gone and the shrimp start to color on their own. When everything is nice and dry, I scoop the shrimp out of the pan into a bowl with the toasted coconut. I don’t add the coconut to the pan, because then everything would continue to roast, and that is not the intention.
We eat these dry-fried shrimp with white rice and gado gado. So simple and so tasty. The shrimp seem even saltier because they are dry-fried; there is simply even more flavor to them. The coconut is also so delicious with it. It gives it a slightly sweet flavor.
Want to learn how to make serundeng too? Check out this link.
