Continuing with what seems to be like Indonesian Heritage Week, I made sate ayam a.k.a Indonesian Chicken Skewers. This was something I’ve wanted to make for awhile since my mom had made sate babi (pork skewers) before. I made this for a friend’s birthday potluck and because there was already a good number of pork dishes by the time I signed up, I decided to make it chicken instead.

I don’t have a recipe link this time around because this is my mom’s recipe. With the caveat of being a typical Asian mom recipe and thus containing general/handwavy amounts of ingredients, this is her recipe:

Ingredients

• 3 lbs of boneless chicken thigh, cubed (or pork shoulder)
• ~5 shallots or 1.5 onions
• ~6-8 garlic cloves
• ~1.5-2 tbsp of sambal oelek or a few thai bird eye chilies
• ~1.5-2 tsp cumin
• ~1.5-2 tsp coriander
• A dash of turmeric
• ~1-2 tbsp of chicken boullion powder
• ~1.5-2 tsp of white pepper
• ~3 tbsp of kecap manis
• ~2-3 tbsp of sugar
• ~1.5-2 tbsp of salt
• A lil bit of cooking oil

Steps:

1. Grind everything except the chicken in a food processor to make a spice paste.
2. Mix cubed chicken with spice paste and let marinate overnight.
3. Thread chicken pieces onto skewer. This should make around 25-30 skewers.
4. Cook on grill. If you don’t have a grill, cook it on frying pan on medium-high, 1-2 min on one side, then flip and cover pan, then cook another 1-2 min. Keep flipping until chicken is cooked and develops dark brown spots.
5. For extra flavor, blowtorch skewers to have some blackened spots.

This recipe came together pretty quickly from grinding up the spice paste and marinating the chicken. I called my mom after doing this step. One trick that I learned from my mom was that I could taste-test the chicken by taking a piece of chicken and cooking it in the microwave for a minute. By tasting it, I could adjust and add more seasonings if needed. When I tasted it first time, I realized that the shallot flavor was the strongest taste coming out and added more coriander and cumin powder to balance out the flavors a little more.

After adjusting and adding more seasoning, it was time to thread the chicken. I thought it would be the simple step of sticking chicken pieces on a bamboo stick but I was wrong. After being shown a demonstration of what to do by my mom over LINE, I realized that I had to thread the chicken pieces onto the skewer like I was weaving in and out, as shown below.

I ended up snipping the ends of the bamboo skewers to make it fit in the frying pan. Again, the importance of a good frying pan comes in where the pan I was using was pretty crappy, in which it lost all of its nonstick coating and easily stuck to the bottom of the pan. Because the marinade contained sugar, the Maillard reaction also kicked in and easily burned on the pan, meaning that I would have to clean the pan between batches, lest I want burnt bits of the previous batch on my next batch.

Ah, I really need to get a new pan.

I also feel like that potentially, these skewers could have been baked as well too. Maybe, that will be something to try next time.

With some coordination and a couple flips of the skewers to make sure all the skewers cooked evenly, I blowtorched skewers to get something reminiscent of the typical burn marks you would see on skewers.

The taste of these skewers were so good. The marinade flavors really came through, particularly the cumin and coriander. I think I would have just added more garlic next time. I could easily eat an entire batch of these by myself easily. They were pretty satisfying to eat even without any sauce and I would make this again if given enough of a heads up.