Gado Gado (Indonesian Salad)

A perfect healthyish summer salad that I love to make.

Prep Time: 30 mins

Cook Time: 1 hour

Total Time: 1 hour 30 mins

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

Gado-gado spicy peanut sauce (or you can pick up the premade sauce at an asian supermarket)

  • 200 gram peanut, deep-fried or roasted

  • 4 cloves garlic

  • 50 gram palm sugar 

  • 1 to 10 Thai chilies, seeded - use as much or as little as you like

  • 1 tablespoon salt

  • 1 teaspoon shrimp paste (Indonesian: terasi, Malaysian: belacan), toasted, omit to make a vegetarian sauce

  • 1 teaspoon tamarind pulp, soaked in 2 tablespoon of warm water to get the juice

  • juice of 1 lime

  • 1 tablespoon sweet soy sauce (kecap manis)

  • 2 cup hot water

Salad (all ingredients can be added or OMITTED, depending on your liking)

  • 4 potatoes (around 400G), peeled, cubed, and boiled

  • 4 eggs, hard-boiled, peeled, and cut into quarters

  • 200-300g deep fried tofu or tempeh

  • 1/2 small cabbage, finely sliced or cut into 2 cm pieces, blanched

  • 1-2 cups bean sprouts, blanched

  • 150g Green beans, blanched

  • blanched spinach

  • 1 cucumber, sliced

  • fried shallots (bawang goreng)

  • prawn crackers (krupuk udang)

Instructions

Gado-gado spicy peanut sauce

  1. Boil eggs, blanch all vegetables and fry tofu or tempeh.

  2. Using a food processor, grind peanuts, garlic, palm sugar, chilies, terasi/belacan/shrimp paste, and salt. Try to stop when the peanuts still have some chunks and not completely turned into a smooth paste.

  3. Transfer the peanut mixture into a mixing bowl, add tamarind juice, lime juice, and sweet soy sauce.

  4. Then add enough hot water to the mixture while stirring to get the consistency of the peanut sauce that you like.

  5. If using premade sauce, sometimes you have to add a bit of water to loosen up the sauce. You can either lightly heat it up in a pan or add hot water.

  6. You can Arrange all gado-gado ingredients in a large plate/bowl, then Garnish with fried shallots and crackers. Just prior to eating the salad, pour the peanut sauce and mix well. Or you can serve each ingredient SEPARATELY and each person makes their own salad.

This is one of the dishes I miss from my childhood and as I can’t find any Indonesian food in Germany yet, I have tried to make this several times. This is one of the easier Indonesian dishes that one can cook or prepare and it is pretty healthy, lots of vegetables that are blanched. The peanut sauce and krupuk are the only really unhealthy ingredients. Yes there are traditional INGREDIENTS used in this dish like cabbage, POTATOES, eggs, cucumber, bean sprouts but there are really no strict rules you can add or omit whatever vegetable you want. But essential is the peanut sauce, it wouldn’t then be a gado gado salad.

cookingJackie Wonggado gado, salad, indonesianComment