Ingredients
- 1 tsp ground turmeric
- 2 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into wedges
- ½ medium cabbage, cut into chunks
- 70g beansprouts
- 100g French beans, trimmed
- ½ medium cucumber, thickly sliced
- 4 hard-boiled eggs, quartered
- 100g firm tofu (such as Tau Kwa brand), cut into 1cm thick slices
- cassava chips (or something else crunchy like deep-fried croutons or wonton skins)
- 3 tbsp coriander leaves
- crisp-fried shallots
Satay sauce
- 4 garlic cloves, peeled
- 1 lemongrass stalk, roughly chopped
- 2½ tbsp sambal oelek (Indonesian crushed chilli paste)
- 2 small pieces of galangal (or peeled fresh root ginger)
- 4 medium shallots, peeled
- 80ml vegetable oil
- ¾ tbsp salt
- 90g sugar
- ½ tbsp sweet paprika
- 2 tbsp thick tamarind water (tamarind pulp whisked with a little water and strained)
- 225g roasted unsalted peanuts (skinned)
- 450ml water
- 200ml coconut milk
Procedure
- Start with the satay sauce. Use a small food processor to blitz the garlic, lemongrass, sambal oelek, galangal and shallots into a homogenous paste. Add a little bit of the vegetable oil, if needed, to bring everything together.
- Heat up the remaining oil in a medium saucepan. Add the paste and cook on a gentle heat for 40–50 minutes, or until the oil starts separating from the paste. Stir regularly. Once ready, combine the salt, sugar and paprika and add to the spice paste. Also add the tamarind water. Cook for a further 10 minutes.
- While the paste is cooking, take the peanuts and crush them roughly in a food processor; they should be chunkier than ground almonds. Put the peanuts and water into a small saucepan and simmer on low heat for 20–25 minutes, or until the mixture thickens and most of the water has evaporated. Add the peanuts (plus water) to the cooked spice paste, stir in the coconut milk and there’s your satay sauce. Keep it somewhere warm.
- Have ready two pots of boiling water; add the turmeric to one of them. Cook the potatoes in the turmeric water until tender, then drain. In the other pot blanch the cabbage for 1 minute; remove, and blanch the beansprouts for 30 seconds. Remove those, then blanch the French beans for 4 minutes and drain (no need to refresh). Keep these vegetables warm.
- Take a large communal serving plate and pile up all the vegetables, eggs, tofu and most of the chips. Generously spoon warm satay sauce on top (you’ll probably have a fair bit left over; you can keep it in the fridge for a few days), then sprinkle with the remaining chips, the coriander and crisp shallots if you like. Serve warm-ish.