Indonesian · Salad
Gado-Gado
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- Blanched: green beans, cabbage, bean sprouts, spinach or kangkung
- Boiled potatoes, halved boiled eggs; cucumber, raw
- Fried tofu and tempeh, sliced thick
- Sauce: 200g fried peanuts, 3 chilies, 2 garlic, 2 tbsp palm sugar, 1 tbsp tamarind, salt; pounded or blitzed with warm water to a thick dressing
- Krupuk (crackers) and fried shallots on top, the mandatory crunch
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg · nuts · peanuts · soy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Blanch each vegetable separately, seconds each, into ice water, color and bite intact.
- Fry the tofu and tempeh golden.
- Make the sauce thick enough to hold a spoon upright, loosened just to pouring.
- Arrange everything in generous piles; flood with warm sauce; crown with krupuk and shallots. Toss at the table.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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