[Sca-cooks] 'Tay!, Sah-tay!

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Lorenz wrote:
>Thanks much!  This is the best overview of sate/satay I've yet seen.  My
>versions (which I will try and remember to post tonight now that I'm back
>home) are all Javanese, so these provide a much better variety of what is
>actually available throughout the islands.

Well i only visited three islands - i lived on Java for several
years, spent a couple weeks in North Sumatra in my ex-husband's
village on the shores of Lake Toba, and only about a week in Bali,
the only place i ever got sick intestinally (and from a Chinese
restaurant) in several years there - and i ate all sorts of food off
pushcarts and in markets (and remember, no refrigeration). I actually
traveled over much of Java - i didn't make it to the Central Northern
area, where Ciribon is known for its Chinese batiks, but i did go
very far into the Central South (home of Loro Kidul, the dangerous
Sea Goddess). Otherwise, i traveled the length of the island from
Jakarta to Surabaya, spent 2 months in Malang in the mountains of
East Java taking classes, and spent a fair bit of time in Central
Java, mostly in Jogya visiting various friends (the daughter of one
couple is all grown up and teaching Bahasa Indonesia at UC-Berkeley).

>Yes, kemiri are also known as candlenuts or buah keras.   Almonds also make
>a good substitute if your local Asian market doesn't carry them and you
>don't want to spend the money on macadamias.  This is another ingredient to
>be careful with, since the raw nuts are fairly toxic and must be cooked
>completely to be safe.

Really? I actually ate one once so i would know what it tasted like.
Bitter, unpleasantly waxy, and damn hard.

>Also, the shrimp paste used in Indonesia is trassi, which is somewhat
>different from the more common (in this area anyway) kapi paste used in Thai
>cooking.  If you do use trassi, be sure and open it in a well-ventilated
>area as it's extremely pungent, but mellows out quite a bit when cooked.

Personally i prefer Thai kapi. I rarely find Indonesian trassi in
shops, but i often find Malaysian blachan, which is distinctly
inferior. Talk about keras, and gritty, too (probably sand from the
"fermentation" pits). And there's always Singaporean petis udang,
which was often used in rujak - yet another type of shrimp paste.

As for the smell of frying trassi, well, i'm so used to it my mouth
begins to water, but i suppose the average American (or Canadian or
Ozzie or other folks on this list) might not have this response. So
thanks for the suggestion.

When i went to the Textile Museum in Washington DC, i walked past
both the Burmese (Myan Mar) and the Laotian Embassies on the same
street. And i could smell the fried fish with shrimp paste... made me
miss Jakarta just a little bit. And i still miss Gudeg, which is
Central Javanese, but there were a couple excellent restaurants in
Jakarta that specialized in it.

Anahita