Kederok and Tahu Kering

I mail ordered a bunch of Indonesian ingredients a couple months ago and then promptly stopped cooking anything Indonesian. But Indonesian cuisine has evolved for the sort of oppressively tropical weather we've been having so now's definitely the time to break it out.

I don't know how useful it is to you guys for me to post about dishes that require ingredients you don't have, but I suppose my conception of a food blog as a practical rather than a voyeuristic endeavor is something of a minority view. For whatever it's worth then, here's a west Javanese salad and an east Javanese tofu dish both from The Indonesian Kitchen.

Kederok

1 fresh semihot chile, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, sliced
1 teaspoon salt
2 small slices dried kencur, soaked in water for 30 minutes [a.k.a. lesser galangal. I was going to use some regular galangal as I haven't been able to get kencur, but it didn't soften enough smush in the mortar. I used a little ginger instead which is a fair approximation.]
3 Tablespoons crunchy peanut butter [I've got smooth so I added some coarsely ground peanuts I keep around for garnishing.]
1 teaspoon tamarind, dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup thin-sliced cucumbers
1 cup bean sprouts
1 cup lettuce, broken into bite-size pieces [I have no lettuce either so I used a cup and a half of cukes and an equal amount of sprouts.]

1. Crush chile, garlic, salt, kencur and peanut butter in a mortar.

2. Strain seeds out of tamarind. Add tamarind and sugar to peanut butter mix.

3. Toss sauce with vegetables until well mixed. Served chilled or room temperature.


Tahu Kering

12 ounces tofu
1/2 cup high smoke point oil for frying
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1/4 cup onion, sliced
2 semihot red chiles, sliced thin diagonally
1 salam leaf
1 piece laos [a.k.a. galangal. I used the two small pieces that didn't work in the salad.]
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons tamarind, dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
1 Tablespoon sweet soy sauce

1. Cut tofu into 1/4-inch thick slices in whatever size in the other two dimensions as you'd like. [The original recipe says 3/4-inch square, but I left mine in slabs a couple inches across and I liked the result.] Heat the oil until not quite smoking, add tofu and fry in batches for five to seven minutes until they are golden brown on the outside. Do not let them cook through or they'll become leathery. If you do it right, they'll crisp up once they're out of the oil.

2. In small bowl mix sugar, salt, strained tamarind liquid and sweet soy sauce.

Remove all but 1 Tablespoon oil. Turn heat to medium. Fry garlic, onion, chiles, salam and laos until the onions and garlic brown. Add tofu and sauce mixture. Turn the tofu pieces to ensure they're all coated with the sauce and fry for five to eight minutes more until all the liquid has evaporated (except the oil which will still be liquid. Don't be fooled!). Serve with rice or on toothpicks with cocktails before dinner.


The salad is not as good as I hoped. I used a natural peanut butter that was pretty dense and had to water down the sauce to get it thin enough to dress the vegetables. That was fine, but then the salt in the dressing made the vegetables express their own liquid and soon we're talking about peanut soup. Actually, recontextualized like that, (and with the seasoning punched back up) it's not bad. It's a little sweet, a little spicy, a little tart, and the peanut does go well with the cucumber and sprouts. On the other hand, I don't like how limp the vegetables got while waiting for me to finish cooking the tofu. Leave the dressing thick and serve immediately and it's worth doing.

The tofu is deeply savory from the browned vegetables and reduced soy sauce plus a little sweet and a little sour. The salam and laos are subtle but distinctively aromatic. It's got a surprisingly meaty chew and a little crispness around the edges. I don't think I can explain it better than that; it's rather odd and since its primary flavor is umami, there's not a lot of appropriate English vocabulary. Pretty tasty though.

CSA week 19 - Semur terong

which would be steamed eggplant in dark sauce. Eggplant stew is the exact translation from Indonesian, but that doesn't tell you much. "Dark sauce" is all that helpful either, I suppose.

Anyway, I didn't much feel like cooking tonight. I've been suffering from the dreaded oogy tummy syndrome lately. But even if I don't want to eat, I've still got to blog so here we are.

This is a modestly modified version of a recipe from my go to Indonesian cookbook The Indonesian Kitchen. I really ought to get another one of these days just to compare the different takes on the cuisine.

Ingredients:
1 pound eggplant, cut horizontally in 1/2 inch thick slices
1 egg, beaten with 1/4 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup thin-sliced onion
1/4 cup thin-sliced pepper
2 cloves garlic, sliced thin
1 cup beef or chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg (less if it's fresh)
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons sweet soy sauce

1. Steam eggplant slices for five minutes. Remove and cool. (I had to pile up my eggplant to fit them all in the steamer. A dual level Chinese-style bamboo steamer might have room to lay everything out. I also found that the eggplant started falling apart as I removed it to a bowl. I decided to just go with that.)

2. Dip eggplant in egg and fry in 4 Tablespoons oil over medium high heat for two to three minutes, until light brown on both sides. (Individually dipping each slice in egg, even if they were holding together, would be a huge pointless pain so I just tossed the eggplant with the egg and dumped it all into a hot pan.) Remove and set aside.

3. Add remaining 2 Tablespoons of oil to pan, heat and add onion, garlic and peppers. Fry two minutes. Add stock, salt, sugar, nutmeg, pepper and sweet soy sauce. Cook three minutes more. Return eggplant and cook two minutes. Serve over rice.



Not much to look at, particularly with the eggplant all broken up like that, but, well, it's not much to taste either. It's rather bland and mushy. Just what my stomach can handle, but that wasn't my intention.

My cookbook has a second semur terong recipe which has made its way out onto the open web, so you can find it here. In retrospect, that looks rather better. Make that instead.

CSA week five - Oseng oseng hijau and sayur lodeh

OK, I admit that last post was pretty lame. If I didn't have to correct the record on sautéing callaloo I wouldn't have posted it at all. To make up for that I'm going to give you a bonus recipe in this post. I made a couple of recipes from central Java tonight and, while you've got everything you need for the sautéed lettuce, you're unlikely to have the ingredients I used in the eggplant stew. I had to mail order them in. I'll append a recipe for semur terong--steamed eggplant in dark sauce--that I like. The only unusual ingredient in that is sweet soy sauce. That you can find locally or you can fake it by using regular soy sauce and a little dark brown sugar. If you're interested in those other ingredients, I talk a bit about them in this post.

Let's start with the sayur lodeh. It's got lots of ingredients but it's really easy. I put:
1 red sweet pepper, cubed
1/4 cup onion, sliced
1 clove garlic, sliced
1 salam leaf
1 piece of laos
1/4 teaspoon Chinese shrimp paste
1/2 teaspoon tamarind paste dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 kemiri nut, crushed
and
1 cup chicken broth
into my dutch oven, brought it to a boil, turned down the heat to medium and cooked it all for five minutes.
Then I added
1 cup coconut milk
and
1 pound eggplant, cut in 1 inch cubes.
I brought it back to a boil and simmered uncovered for ten minutes, stirring frequently until the eggplant was soft but not falling apart. And that was it.

My cookbook, The Indonesian Kitchen, says you can substitute 2 cups of string beans and 1 cup of cabbage for the eggplant, but I really like the way the eggplant has absorbed the spiced coconut broth. It would probably cling to the cabbage, but it would run right off of the beans. If I were making it with the alternative vegetables I think I'd fish them out and then reduce the broth to a saucier consistency.



The Oseng oseng hijau has an odd ingredient list that avoids the typical Javanese flavors:
2 Tablespoons onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 Tablespoon butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup water
1 head lettuce, torn or cut into coarse chunks. The Indonesian Kitchen suggests Boston or Romaine lettuce but I used the komatsuna.

1. Melt the butter in a wok or large pan over medium heat. When the butter has stopped sizzling add the onion and garlic. (I accidentally browned the butter. Whoops!)

2. Fry the onion and garlic in the butter for three minutes. Add the salt, pepper and water, cook for a minute and add the lettuce.

3. Turn the heat up to high and stir fry the lettuce for three more minutes until the lettuce is wilted but retains some texture.

The komatsuna works nicely here because you get two textures with the wilted leaves and firmer stems. The buttery lettuce is not bad just like that, but I thought the dish woke up when I added a little bit of sweet soy sauce. Clearly there's no real reason to stick with Indonesian condiments here but you'll probably want to add a shot of something.

And here's the Steamed Eggplant in Dark Sauce

Ingredients:
1 pound eggplant, cut horizontally in 1/2 inch thick slices
1 egg, beaten with 1/4 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup thin-sliced onion
2 cloves garlic, sliced thin
1 cup beef or chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons sweet soy sauce

1. Steam the eggplant slices in a Chinese-style steamer for five minutes. Remove and allow to cool.

2. Dip the eggplant in the egg and fry in 4 Tablespoons of oil for two minutes or until light brown on both sides. Set aside.

3. Fry the onion and garlic in the remaining 2 Tablespoons of oil for two minutes. Add the stock, salt, sugar, nutmeg, pepper and sweet soy sauce. Cook for three minutes. Return the eggplant and cook, basting for two minutes.

It's been a while since I've made this but I recall liking how the nutmeg combined with the sweet soy sauce and how the resulting flavor complimented the eggplant.