KO EN Indonesian Snack⏱ 90 minEdit history

Kemplang (Grilled Fish and Tapioca Crackers)

Name: Kemplang (Grilled Fish and Tapioca Crackers)
Prep time: 40 min
Cook time: 50 min
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 6 servings
Cuisine: Indonesian
Ingredients: 300 g Spanish mackerel or white fish fillet; 250 g tapioca starch; 1.5 tsp salt; 1 tsp sugar; 2 cloves garlic; 80 ml iced water; 4 tbsp sambal

South Sumatra's fish cracker: Spanish mackerel or another fish worked into a dough with tapioca starch, steamed, sliced thin, dried hard in the sun, and grilled over charcoal until it puffs — no oil at all, and dark scorch marks where the fire touched it. Eaten with sambal. It shows that the cracker trick of drying a cooked starch and then blowing it up with heat does not need a pan of oil to work.

Steps

Blitz the fish with the salt and iced water in a food processor to a smooth, sticky paste. The salt going in first is the point.
⏲ 3 min
Mix in the garlic and sugar, then work in the tapioca starch a little at a time by hand to a dough that is smooth and no longer sticks to your hands.
⏲ 5 min
Roll it into two 4cm logs and steam 40 minutes over boiling water. They are done when firm to a press in the middle and translucent right through.
⏲ 40 min
Cool, wrap and refrigerate overnight. It has to be firm to slice thin.
Slice evenly 2-3mm thick. Uneven slices mean the thin ones puff and the thick ones stay hard inside.
Spread them on racks without overlapping and dry in the sun 2-3 days, or in a 60°C oven with the door ajar for 5-6 hours. Keep going until a slice snaps cleanly instead of bending.
Set a rack over charcoal or a gas flame. Hold one slice at a time in tongs and keep turning it. It puffs white from the edges; when the whole slice has puffed, take it off. Thirty seconds to a minute each.
⏲ 45 sec
Eat at once with sambal.

Tips & Variations

Variations

Fried kemplang: Korean Wikipedia says kemplang is dried in the sun and then grilled or fried. This recipe grills, and the dark scorch marks the article says grilling can leave are the sign of it. To fry, the same dried slices go into 180°C oil for a few seconds.
The name: Korean Wikipedia gives it as Palembang's word for pounding, after the step of flattening the dough.
The krupuk on the side: the crackers served with nasi goreng, gado-gado and mie goreng are the same family, and soto Lamongan pounds them into its broth.
Prawn instead of fish: the same dough made with prawn meat is a prawn cracker. The method does not change.

Tips

Heat does the puffing, not oil. Bugak gives the mechanism: "The starch was cooked and then dried, so the moment it meets oil the little water left inside it turns to steam all at once and blows the film into a foam." Bugak gets that heat from oil. Grilled kemplang shows the same thing happening over charcoal: what is needed is enough heat to turn the trapped water into steam at once, and oil is one way of delivering it.
Steam it, then dry it. The same order as bugak. As soto Lamongan puts it, "The starch in a cracker is already cooked" — that is what lets it puff. Do not dry the dough raw; steam it first.
Grind the fish with the salt first. Kamaboko gives the reason for the step: once the fish is washed, "almost only muscle-fibre protein is left, which salt dissolves" and heat then sets it springy. The starch goes in after.
Dry means it keeps. As bugak says, "Fully dried bugak has no water for microbes to live in and keeps for months at room temperature." Bend a slice: dry it until it snaps instead of bending.
Do not leave it on the fire. Left on one side it burns before it puffs. Keep turning it with the tongs and follow the puffing edge round (grilling).
Eat it as soon as it is grilled. The dried slices can wait; grilled ones should not. Grill only what you are going to eat.