Traditional Food, Gado - gado and gudeg

1. Gado-gado

Gado-gado is the one salad from Indonesia that needs no introduction. The creamy, sweet, sour, and spicy peanut sauce is really what makes this a great salad. If there is such a thing as a national salad, this gado-gado will be it. Gado-gado is one of Indonesia's most favourite dish everywhere in the world. It is actually vegetable salad dressed in specially prepared peanut sauce. In Indonesia, there are a few dish that resemble gado-gado (with the same kind, or a variation of peanut sauce), such as pecel, lotek, and ketoprak. Pecel and lotek is the closest to gado-gado, so people often mistake them as gado-gado. Preparation of gado-gado is mainly the preparation of the peanut sauce. There are many gado-gado recipes in the Internet, but most of them advice the use of peanut butter or freshly fried peanut grinded with a blender. But the original traditional Indonesian gado-gado uses cobek batu (Indonesian style stone pestle). This is one of the ingenous Indonesian food preparation technique.

Ingredients :

Peanut Sauce :

200 gram peanut, deep fried or roasted

4 cloves garlic

50 gram palm sugar (Indonesian: gula Jawa)

1 to 10 Thai chilies (Indonesian: cabe rawit), seeded - use as much or as little as you like

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon toasted shrimp paste (Indonesian: terasi), omit to make a vegetarian sauce

1 teaspoon tamarind pulp, soaked in 2 tablespoon of warm water to get the juice

juice of 1 lime

1 tablespoon sweet soy sauce (Indonesian: kecap manis)

2 cup hot water

Must Have Salad Ingredients : 

4 potatoes, peeled, cubed, and boiled

4 eggs, hard boiled, peeled, and cut into quarters

Optional Salad Ingredients :

blanched cabbage (Indonesian: kol)

blanched bean sprouts (Indonesian: tauge)

blanched snake beans (Indonesian: kacang panjang)

blanched green beans (Indonesian: buncis)

blanched spinach (Indonesian: bayam)

raw cucumber (Indonesian: timun)

boiled chayote (Indonesian: labu siam)

deep fried tofu

deep fried tempeh

melinjo crackers (Indonesian: emping)

Instructions :

Peanut Sauce :

Place peanut, garlic, palm sugar, Thai chilies, salt, and toasted shrimp paste in a food processor. Grind until everything is well mixed. Remove into a mixing bowl.

Add tamarind juice, lime juice, and sweet soy sauce and mix well.

Pour only enough of the hot water while keep stirring to get to the consistency of peanut sauce that you like.

To serve :

Place some boiled eggs, boiled potatoes, and whatever optional salad ingredients that you want to have in your gado-gado. Serve the peanut sauce in a small bowl.

Just prior to eating the salad, pour the peanut sauce and mix well

2. Gudeg

Gudeg is a traditional Javanese cuisine from Yogyakarta and Central Java, Indonesia. Gudeg is made from young unripe jack fruit (Indonesian : nangka muda) boiled for several hours with palm sugar, and coconut milk. Additional spices include garlic, shallot, candlenut, coriander seed, galangal, bay leaves, and teak leaves, the latter giving a reddish-brown color to the dish. It is often described as "green jack fruit sweet stew".