This past week, I was inspired/craving to make my people’s food for house dinner. On the menu was:

• Ayam Ungkep/Goreng (Indonesian Fried Chicken): recipe here
• Nasi Kuning (turmeric and coconut rice): recipe here
• Telur Dadar Gulung (rolled egg omelet): recipe here

I could probably count the amount of times I’ve made Indonesian food in my lifetime on one hand. Big reason is that, like a good chunk of Southeast Asian food, most Indonesian food are pretty labor intensive or require a ridiculous amount of ingredients/spices. Whether the recipe calls for like 2.5 hours of simmering or like 16 ingredients (some of which are a bit harder to find like Kaffir lime leaves or candlenuts) to be ground up into spice paste, there’s going to be some level of commitment involved when making this type of food.

Which is why when I make the conscious decision to make Indonesian food, you better bet that I’m prepared to go all out because I’ll only make this once in a while.

Anyway, I chose these recipes because they seem pretty straightforward and would satisfy the Indonesian itch.

Ayam Ungkep/Goreng

It seems that a lot of different Indonesian fried chicken recipes involve cooking the chicken twice in some way. In this recipe, this type of chicken is braised then deep-fried.

Most of the labor came in the form of gathering the many ingredients that go into the spice paste, which is what makes the main part of what the chicken would be braised in. For example, one of the ingredients called for was a knob of galangal. I never cooked with galangal so that was pretty new. It was a bit of a pain to grate the galangal since it’s usually a pretty hardy root that seems pretty tough and inedible otherwise. Anyway, I put all the ingredients in my food processor, which also marked the first time I used it for something other than pate sucree dough, and blended it to a paste. It was a little chunky and probably would have been more smooth, had I used a mortar/pestle but I have neither of those things. Nevertheless, I had my paste.

I added the chicken, lemon grass, coconut water, and spice paste into a pot and let it simmer for the next 50 minutes. I then took it out and dried it. One cool note was that the braising broth left behind in the pot tasted a lot like soto ayam. This would probably be another meal to add more chicken and some hardboiled eggs to the broth and eat it with rice. That broth ended up being pretty tasty to eat with porridge.

After drying the pieces down, I deep fried the chicken as the finishing touch, making the outside crispy and browned in some areas.

Nasi Kuning

Nasi kuning is a yellow rice dish, flavored with turmeric and coconut milk. Continuing with the yellow trend, this dish was also pretty straightforward and surprisingly easy to put together. I was a little wary of the rice:water ratio, which was 2 cups of rice: 3 cups of water but it ended up working out after I let it sit after cooking. I think I could have added more coconut milk for a more coconutty taste.

Telur Dadar Gulung

Telur Dadar Gulung (or egg omelet) is like making crepes, except it’s just one ingredient–egg. It was through this process that I realized how not-flat and how very concave-down my frying pan was. Every time I’d pour out some whisked eggs, it would automatically run to the sides and be unable to stay in the center. As a result, the crepes end up looking a bit like donuts with a thin center but a thick outside, to the point where I would have to take the eggs off a little earlier because I didn’t want to burn the thin layer at the center of the omelet. i was afraid of accidentally tearing the egg omelet but luckily, I never did. The egg omelet did look a little wetter than I would like with some runny egg liquid squeezing out of the omelet from the thicker parts of the omelet that didn’t fully cook but I made it work.

I rolled up the egg crepes and sliced them thinly, which would later serve as a side dish for dinner. They looked so pretty!

Overall

This dinner was pretty good. While these are dishes that I don’t think I’ll make super often, this was fun to indulge in once in a while. I like that the doubly cooked chicken that was initially braised made the chicken taste moist and not all dried out. This dinner was also quite colorful. Along with the three dishes, I also sliced up some cucumbers, tomatoes, and romaine lettuce to eat as sides.

This was fun to work on and I also managed to finish cooking by a reasonable dinner time (at 7:15, not 8!!) as well.

I think the veggies offset how yellow the rice and chicken were since this ended up being a pretty colorful looking meal. With some sambal/fried garlic (or shallots) to the side, this was a pretty satisfying meal. I felt like I was paying some sort of homage to my ancestors in a “See, I might be American-washed but I promise I’m not a complete disappointment.” way.