Indonesian Chicken Saté
This is the first recipe in my series simple but delicious: chicken meat grilled or fried on wooden sticks along with plain white rice and peanut sauce.
What you need:
500g Chicken meat chopped in small pieces
Bamboo sticks
Rice (best is Thai rice)
For the sauce:
Peanut butter
Soy Sauce
Water
You can add if you like:
Garlic (to the meat)
Cayenne pepper (to the sauce)
Cucumber (not on the picture)
For preparing the meat just put it on to the bamboo sticks and then marinate it for a few hours in the fridge. According to your taste you can also add fine cut garlic. But it will also taste perfectly fine without.
Approximately 25 minutes before you want to eat you should start to cook the rice. So heat up a smaller sized pot that is halfway filled with water. When it is boiling add the rice. I usually do it by feeling to achieve the right amount of rice to the water. But you can proceed like this:
Pour as much rice into the boiling water so that you can see the rice in the middle look out of the pot like a small ice mountain. Then stir the rice and water and add again once some rice so that there is the little top looking out again. Then stir again and let it boil on very low flame for 15 minutes. All the water will be cooked into the rice and draining not necessary. As I am using an electric stove (not ceran) I switch off the heat completely when it boils again after adding the rice. After 15 minutes the rice will be fine without using any more energy.
I did not write about adding salt, as the very original way of asian rice cooking is without salt. If you do not like that you can add some salt of course after pouring in the rice.
Now you should heat up a pan or a grill to fry/grill the chicken sticks.
At the same time you can prepare the delicious peanut sauce. First you must boil water in a pot or a water cooker. Then take a small sized pot (about same size as for the rice) and put some peanut butter in. Maybe about 2 or 3 table spoons. Then add some sprinkles of soy sauce. Remember that soy sauce is very salty and that in asian cooking the only way of adding salt to a dish is by adding soy sauce, fish sauce or oyster sauce. So to find out if you have enough soy sauce in the peanut sauce is by taking a taste before serving.
But now to the peanut butter and the soy sauce add boiling water. The amount of water you add should be as much that there is about half as much liquid (water + soy sauce) as there is peanut butter. Now you must patiently stir it with a spoon. The fat peanut butter and the water will join into an emulsion first where you have the feeling that it will not really mix. But it will! After 3 to 5 minutes of patient stirring you will have a nice homogenous sauce that you can vary in it´s consistency. If it is too thin just add some more peanut butter and stir it in. If it is too thick it might need more water. But before you add water taste it if it is salty enough, and if not: add some soy sauce. At this point you can also add cayenne pepper to your taste.
Now it is ready to eat! Just put rice on the plate, chicken sticks aside and the sauce on top of the chicken. Some slices of cucumber aside as a mini salad without dressing will work great, as the taste of the cucumber perfectly goes together with the taste of the peanut sauce.
You can even have that dish as a vegetarian meal: just leave away the chicken sticks and the rice with Saté Sauce and cucumber will be tasting excitingly enough.
Bon apetit!
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