Kerak Telor (Charred Sticky Rice and Duck Egg Omelette)

Variations

• 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.
• 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.

Tips

• Sticking is the point. Every other page here says 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.
• 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 the water that cooks it comes from the egg. So there is no rice-to-water ratio in this recipe at all, only a rice-to-egg ratio -- 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.