Spicy Balinese Long Bean Salad with Pan-Seared Tuna

Tim and I tried another recipe from my Lobong culinary experience in Ubud, Bali since many of the ingredients overlapped with the chicken satay and peanut sauce...  tonight's recipe was a pan seared tuna steak on top of a spicy, fragrant long bean and cabbage salad.  

And by "spicy," I really mean, "burned our faces off."  Oops.

Despite the excessively pedas salad, this dish was still good.  Perhaps next time I would use fewer chilis.  Far fewer. 

The recipe seems to be Chef Dewa's riff on the traditional Balinese dish, ikan bakar sambal matah, which is grilled fish with a raw chili sambal.  He put the sambal and fish on some veggies and made it into a healthy and fresh tasting salad.

Here's the recipe, adapted and with my notes:

Ikan Bakar Sambal Matah Salad

Adapted from the Lobong Culinary Experience

Ingredients:

100 grams of tuna (Tim and I upped the tuna factor and got one super fresh tuna steak each)

15 shallots, halved and sliced super thin (This measurement is for the tiny Indonesian shallots... if using regular French style shallots, maybe more like 4 or 5)

10 bird's eye chilis, minced (Based on my experience, I would recommend fewer unless you want to lose functionality in your lips and tongue) 

5 kaffir lime leaves, shredded

4 lemongrass stalks, tender center white part only, thinly sliced

1 piece torch ginger (My grocery store was out of this, so I improvised by grating/micro-planing about an inch long chunk of regular ginger)

100 grams of cabbage, shredded (Chef Dewa says crunchy romaine is a good substitute, too)

100 grams of long beans, sliced into pea-sized pieces (You could substitute regular green beans here)

Handful of cherry tomatos, halved

90 ml of coconut oil (I used the fresh coconut oil made by the Lobong family, which was delicious. The only problem: it had solidified in our air conditioned apartment, so I had to dip the bottle in warm water to loosen it up... didn't that problem when cooking outside at the Lobong compound... don't substitute this with another oil, though, as the coconutty flavor is essential)

Squeeze of lime juice (my addition)

Directions:

1. Toss all ingredients except tuna together in a salad bowl.

2. Lightly salt and pepper tuna steak, then sear both sides briefly in vegetable oil over medium-high heat.

3. Either top the salad with the tuna, or break the tuna up and gently toss it with the salad.

4. Enjoy and cross your fingers that you don't blow up from the heat of the chilis.

Balinese Chicken Satay and Peanut Sauce

While relaxing in Ubud, Bali (where there was less praying and loving than eating), Liz, Meghan and I took a cooking course (or "culinary experience," if you will) with the Lobong family, described in detail at my other blog.  The course was pretty awesome and I think we learned a lot, but recreating the recipes at home was a bit of a challenge, as once I looked in the recipe booklet we were sent home with, things were a little bit unclear, to say the least.  I may have to volunteer my editorial services (not like my blog is a paragon of perfect writing by any means, but this cook book is really struggling in the areas of English writing and completeness).

I decided to start with what I thought might be the simplest recipe we learned, Balinese chicken satay with peanut sauce.  In the end it's not all that time consuming, with the caveat that you've made the basic Balinese spice paste, base gede, in advance.  The spice paste is not difficult, but does involve unwrapping about a million garlic cloves and shallots, as well as peeling ginger, turmeric root, and galangal (or, in this case, lesser galangal or kencur).  Luckily I had a brand new peeler from Amy for this task (THANKS, AMY!).  The spice paste recipe makes a ton, can be frozen in ice cube trays for future use, and is used in a lot of Balinese recipes.

Once the spice paste is made, you basically just have to cut the chicken, toss it in some paste along with some keffir lime leaves, palm sugar and salt, marinate while you heat up the coals and then grill it.  The peanut sauce is pretty straightforward, too, although I couldn't get mine to thin out into a sauce- it was pretty thick and peanut-buttery despite all my best efforts.  I tried using my new big ole' mortar and pestle, but it was a little too much elbow work for my post-work arms, so I moved on to the food processor to finish off the peanut sauce.  Perhaps therein lies the problem.

Once I hear back from Lobong on the vagaries of their written recipes, I'll post the recipes here!

Beef Rendang: Take 2

Ok, so after my last beef rendang attempt and failure, I felt I needed to redeem myself.  If at first you don't succeed, yada yada...  this time I tried using this recipe from Rasa Malaysia (yeah, I know, Malaysia is not Indonesia, but the author claims to be using an Indonesian recipe). It looked more promising than the last recipe I tried- it involves a paste made from all of the aromatics, plus additional spices (which are so cheap here! hooray for the spice islands!), but most importantly, the recipe had more detailed instructions.

Well, I gave it ye olde college try, but the recipe was still not successful.  Sigh. Fail. Maybe closer than the last try, but not quite right.  While the flavor is nice and it smells amazing, I can't seem to achieve the deep, dark caramelization that they get at restaurants here.  Tim says that I can buy pre-darkened coconut milk here, but that seems a little bit like cheating and none of the recipes I've seen online include it. 

Perhaps I need to take a cooking class here and have someone show me how to make this dish correctly.

The redeeming factor in all of this is that I made nasi goreng with the leftover rice, and it was delicious.  Nasi goreng is Indonesian fried rice, made with chilies, garlic, onion, kecap manis (a thick, sweet Indonesia soy sauce- "manis" = sweet), and usually shrimp paste (terasi udang), which stinks to holy hell, but gives the dish the umami flavor it needs. The ingredients vary slightly depending on who's making it, but the ones I listed seem to be the essential ones.  I put chicken on my rice, but you can put pretty much anything on top and call it breakfast, lunch or dinner here.  Egg, shrimp, chicken...

Beef Rendang: Partial FAIL

Last weekend I tried my hand at cooking some Indonesian food... partial fail.  See my other blog for a description of my attempt at making beef rendang. 

Here's the recipe I used, which I deem to be tasty, but not quite asli (genuine, authentic).  I'd like to try a recipe that uses more fresh, whole spices and has better directions for getting the tender, deeply caramelized flavor I was hoping for.  Maybe this recipe from Rasa Malaysia should be my next attempt. 

Beef Rendang
From The Complete Indonesian Cookbook, by Agnes De Keijzer Brackman and Cathay Brackman

Ingredients:
1 tbsp vegetable oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 stalk lemongrass, crushed
1 lb cubed beef topside round (I used beef that I bought at the store that was specifically labeled "Rendang beef", but I think it's pretty much stew beef.)
2 or more red chilies (such as birdseye chilies), crushed
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups coconut milk
1 salam leaf (essentially Indonesian bay leaf, as I understand)

Directions:
- Heat oil in a frying pan
- Add garlic, turmeric, ginger and lemongrass; saute lightly
- Add meat and chilies; saute for 3 minutes, stirring frequently; add salt and mix well
- Pour coconut milk over meat and add salam leaf.  Cover and cook over low heat until almost dry.