Frankly, you haven’t tasted Indonesia until you’ve tasted gado-gado. It is a feature of our Art de Vivre Bali Retreat. If you have tried it, it may or may not have looked like the gado-gado in this picture. Let’s explain.

Firstly, please familiarise yourself with the concept of gado-gado on our travel blog here: Stay calm and be a gado-gado aficionado.

If you can’t travel that far, read this modified excerpt…

“To loosely summarise, it’s a plate of veg with peanut sauce and rice. It can be boiled veg, or salad-i-fied veg, or a mix. It doesn’t sound world-beating does it? And sometimes it’s not to be fair. If you just get the basic, peasant-end Gado-gado with boiled carrot, cabbage, potato and green beans, it can be pretty poor. Yet, still more nutritious than a lot of other options on the menu.

But when a Gado-gado is prepared with love, and when some of the optional and regional Gado-gado special bits are included, Gado-gado can leap-frog all else on the menu to rightly assert itself as the Indonesian food boss. In King Gado-gado we trust.”

Now that you know all about gado-gado let’s get on with the task of making the peanut sauce. This recipe was shown to us by the wonderful staff at Gili Cooking Classes on Gili Air.

 

 

Peanut sauce for gado-gado

Serves 2

Ingredients
2/3 cup unsalted peanuts in skins
1 x tbsp vegetable or rice bran oil
1 x clove garlic
1 x finely chopped red birds-eye chilli (or to taste)
15g palm sugar
1 x pinch salt.
3 tbsp sweet soy sauce
6 x tbsp water

Method
1. Fry the peanuts in the oil until they take on a golden colour.
2. Blend the peanuts and garlic for 30 seconds to a moist powder.
3. In a pestle and mortar, blend the peanut-garlic powder, chilli, salt and palm sugar to a flavoursome pulp.
4. Add 3 tbsps water to the pulp and work hard to smoothen the sauce. I like it quite chunky.
5. Add the soy sauce and continue to blend.
6. Add more water if you want a thinner consistency or if you intend to warm the sauce.

Enjoy the recipe.

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