Cookaholics Bulletin Board

This is mainly a Pepperhead and Tatoosh question, but feel free to chime in:

There are at least 2 dozen different types of jarred Indonesian and Malaysian "sambal" available at my local Chinese supermarket. If I wanted to buy only 2 or 3 in order to be able to do a Indonesian and Malaysian cooking, which types should they be and what should I look for? Which are very spicy and which only mildly so? I think Sambal Oelek is probably one, but otherwise I'm lost.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambal

Sorry that I can't help much here. I haven't made it over to Malaysia or Singapore yet, and Indonesia isn't on my list of places to go. The Sambal looks very interesting, the Sambal Bajack particularly. I would, however, steer far wide of the Sambal Durian based on my one experience with the durian fruit.

We did make a Malaysian style coconut rice yesterday, which is very similar to a Filipino coconut rice but the Malay use long grain rice where the Filipino use a sticky rice. It has coconut milk, fresh ginger, and pandan leaf as the primary flavorings. It disappeared pretty quickly, but then most rice does here regardless.

Tatoosh,

Yes, I just borrowed a Malay cookbook from the library, and that coconut rice is the first recipe in the "rice" section. Seems that it's a common Malay breakfast dish.

At last, I have a use for that pandan leaf in the freezer ...

I can't really help much with this, either, as I have never bought any. To me, it is one of those things like pad Thai sauce or curry pastes - a shortcut to a sauce that really is not too hard to make, and the commercial versions may have preservatives in them, like vinegar, that really don't taste right. Commercial Szechwan chili pastes are pretty good, since they are, as a rule, fermented chili pastes, and the vinegar and other sour flavors burn off with the intense heat of that type of cooking, but with these types of sauces - often eaten as uncooked (or at lest no further cooking) table sauces - there is no substitute for the real thing.

I have actually seen sambal olek called for in recipes in a couple of books as if it was the Chinese chili paste - added to recipes a couple Tb at a time, in the beginning of a SF, which is not how it is used traditionally.

If you want a really good recipe for sambal ulek, check out Oseland's Cradle of Flavor. There is also a recipe for a raw sambal belacan, which is much hotter, since it is raw, plus it has a bunch of Thai peppers in it in addition to the milder red Hollands, or fresnos, which is what I use. The cooked sambal ulek keeps for at least a week, but the raw sambal belacan only keeps for 2-3 days, due to the raw garlic and shallots in it. And the ulek can be frozen fairly successfully, in my experience, refreshing it with a brief reheating.

And speaking of coconut rice, there is a delicious recipe with lemongrass in it (plus, if I remember correctly, daun salam) in that book.