Malaysian · Main
Sambal Udang
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a warm current of chile, acid holding everything up to the light, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 600g large prawns, shells off, tails on (keep 4 heads for the oil: flavor lives there)
- Paste: 12 dried chilies soaked, 8 shallots, 4 garlic, 1 tbsp belacan, toasted
- 2 tbsp tamarind water; 1 tbsp palm sugar
- 1 onion in petals; oil, generous
- Rice, and more rice
The skills inside
Frying the paste until the oil splits
Allergen screen
Found: shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
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Method
- Fry the prawn heads in the oil 2 min; press and discard: the oil is now amber gold. 2 min
- Fry the pounded paste in that oil, patiently, 10–12 min until it darkens and the oil returns to the surface (pecah minyak, the oil breaks). 12 min
- Tamarind, palm sugar, splash water; taste for the sweet-sour-heat triangle.
- Prawns and onion petals in; 3–4 min only, glossed and just curled. Over rice, spooning every drop of the red oil. 4 min
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.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
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
- Limeade or young coconut
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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