Name: Kerak Telor (Charred Sticky Rice and Duck Egg Omelette)
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 50 min
Yield: 2 servings
Cuisine: Indonesian
Ingredients: 100 g glutinous rice; 2 duck eggs; 1 tbsp dried shrimp; 0.5 tsp salt; 1 tsp sugar; 0.25 tsp white pepper; oil; 60 g grated coconut; 1 tsp ground coriander; 0.5 tsp ground cumin; 1 slice galangal; 1 tbsp palm sugar; 2 kaffir lime leaves; 2 tbsp fried shallots; 0.5 tsp chilli powder

Ingredients

2servings

The omelette (cook one portion at a time)
glutinous rice · soaked overnight, then drained100 g
duck eggs · hen's eggs work; read the tips first2
dried shrimp · toasted in a dry pan and pounded1 tbsp
salt0.5 tsp
sugar1 tsp
white pepper0.25 tsp
oil · none. There is no point in this recipe at which oil goes in
Serundeng (the topping)
grated coconut · fresh or frozen60 g
ground coriander1 tsp
ground cumin0.5 tsp
galangal · thinly sliced; ginger stands in1 slice
palm sugar1 tbsp
kaffir lime leaves · finely shredded2
To finish
fried shallots2 tbsp
chilli powder · optional0.5 tsp

Steps

Soak the glutinous rice overnight, then drain it thoroughly. It is not boiled -- the rice cooks on the pan, mostly in the water the egg brings.
Make the serundeng. In a dry pan over a low heat, stir the grated coconut with the spices, galangal and palm sugar for 10 minutes, until it is deep brown and smells nutty. Stir in the lime leaves at the end and let it cool (browning and the Maillard reaction).
⏲ 10 min
Heat a small cast-iron or carbon-steel pan dry, with no oil, over a medium flame until it is properly hot. Not a non-stick pan -- with nothing to weld to, this dish does not work at all.
⏲ 2 min
Spread half the soaked rice over the pan, sprinkle over 2 tbsp of water, cover and leave 3 minutes. The grains go half translucent and start to grip the metal.
⏲ 3 min
Beat one duck egg with the salt, sugar, pepper and pounded dried shrimp, pour it over the rice and spread it thin and even with the back of a spoon: 18-20cm across and no more than 5mm thick.
Cook uncovered for 4 minutes. Even as the edge begins to lift, do not free it. The base has to weld to the pan as one sheet before the next step is possible.
⏲ 4 min
Take the handle and turn the pan upside down, holding it 10-15cm above the flame with the omelette facing down. Give it 90 seconds, until the surface dries and blisters and chars in patches. With a grill you can instead put the pan under it for 5 minutes.
⏲ 1 min 30 sec
Set the pan down and scrape the omelette off the base with a spatula. The blackened face is the kerak. Top with serundeng, fried shallots and chilli, and eat it on the spot.
⏲ 1 min

Variations

Without dried shrimp: you can leave it out, but the salt and the savour go with it. Push the salt up a little to compensate.
More serundeng: the version sold at the Jakarta Fair carries twice the topping. Serundeng keeps a week in a jar, so it is worth making a big batch.
Hotter: sambal on the side instead of chilli powder. Betawi vendors normally ask.
Under a grill: if holding the pan inverted feels precarious, put the whole pan under a grill at step 7 instead. Almost the same result, with less char at the edges.

More detail and the reasons why (1)

With hen's eggs: three of them, if duck eggs are hard to find. Duck is the standard because the yolk is a larger share of the egg, so there is more fat and lecithin and a thinly spread omelette holds together as one sheet. With hen's eggs it tears more easily, so spread it a little thicker.

Tips

Sticking is the point. Most cooking does the opposite. Browning and the Maillard reaction tells you to turn something when it releases from the pan by itself; dorayaki tells you to wipe the oil out because oil left in the pan fries a blotch. Kerak telor uses no oil at all, so the mixture bonds to the metal as a single sheet, and that bond is the structure of the dish.

More detail and the reasons why (5)

It has to stick before it can be inverted, and inverting is how the top cooks. You cannot turn a 5mm sheet with a spatula, and a lid would drip condensation onto it. What is left is to turn the whole pan over and use the coals as a heat source from above. At that moment the pan is a lid rather than a cooking surface, and the food hangs beneath it cooking by radiant heat. Asado uses the same heat when it straps a side of ribs to an iron cross and stands it away from the fire -- but that is a large piece of meat cooked from the side, and this is five millimetres cooked from above.
The kerak is the same thing paella calls socarrat. That page calls socarrat the prize and says only to use high heat at the end and not burn it. The mechanism is this: a starch layer in direct contact with metal, once its water has gone, climbs past 100C, and that is where browning starts. In a paella it is a bonus under the rice. Here that layer is the whole food and the dish is named after it.
The rice is never boiled. Soaked glutinous rice goes straight onto the pan and most of the water that cooks it comes from the egg; the 2 tbsp and the lid in step 4 only half-cook the grains so they grip the metal. So the ratio that matters is not rice-to-water but rice-to-egg -- how much rice one duck egg can wet is what sets the size of a portion (cooking rice).
Non-stick will not do. On a pan the mixture cannot grip, it never becomes one sheet, and it drops the moment you turn the pan over. One of the few recipes where the equipment is the method.
It came out of making do. The starting point, in Dutch colonial Jakarta, was that the glutinous rice to hand was poor; the egg, the serundeng and the dried shrimp were piled on to make it worth eating. Those toppings are now half the dish.

The basics behind this dish

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