Photo: Gunawan Kartapranata · CC BY-SA 4.0
Seblak (Crackers Cooked Soft in Kencur Chilli Sauce)
A Sundanese dish from the Parahyangan region of West Java: unfried dried crackers boiled until soft, then cooked with egg or prawns in a paste of kencur, shallot, garlic and bird's-eye chilli. Chewy and hot. The name comes from Sundanese words for a stinging taste, and the sting is the kencur.
Ingredients
- unfried dried crackers · garlic crackers or similar100 g
- kencur (aromatic ginger) · ginger will do, but it tastes different3 cm
- shallots4
- garlic3 cloves
- bird's-eye chillies · to taste6
- salt0.5 tsp
- cooking oil2 tbsp
- water300 ml
- eggs2
- prawns · peeled6
- cabbage · roughly sliced1 handful
- spring onions2
Steps
- ⏲ 6 min
Boil the crackers 5-7 minutes, until they bend and go soft. Drain.
- ⏲ 3 min
Grind the kencur, shallots, garlic, chillies and salt to a paste.
- ⏲ 2 min
Fry the paste in the oil 2 minutes, until the kencur smells.
- ⏲ 1 min
Push the paste to one side, crack in the eggs and scramble them.
- ⏲ 2 min
Add the water, and when it boils add the prawns and cabbage.
- ⏲ 3 min
Add the boiled crackers and cook 3 minutes. When the sauce clings to them, take it off the heat. Cooked longer, the crackers fall apart.
- ⏲ 30 sec
Scatter over the spring onions and serve hot.
Variations
- More broth. Double the water and eat it like a soup.
- Other fillings. Macaroni, fish balls or chicken feet go in alongside or instead of the crackers; every stall has its own.
- Soto lamongan. The East Javan soup that pounds the same kind of cracker and scatters it over the broth to thicken it.
Tips
- Use unfried crackers. Fried ones fall apart in water almost at once.
- The kencur is the dish. The sting the name refers to comes from it.
- Set the heat with the number of chillies.
- The crackers go in last and do not cook long.
- The old name describes the texture. Indonesian Wikipedia records a similar dish before seblak called kurupuk léor, named for its limp texture.
More detail and the reasons why (1)
- The same cracker, taken the other way. A cracker is a cooked starch that has been dried. Kemplang and bugak heat it so the water left inside turns to steam and puffs it crisp. Soto lamongan pounds it and scatters it over the broth, where the already-cooked starch thickens the bowl with no boiling. Seblak boils it whole. The cooked starch takes water back in, and instead of going crisp or dissolving it turns chewy.
The basics behind this dish
- Deep Frying: Temperature, Batter, and the Second FryFrying is not cooking in oil so much as trading the food's water for it. Two temperatures, what each kind of coating is for, and why the second fry exists.
- Heat Control: Preheating, Oil, and Reading the PanThe same ingredients become a different dish depending on pan temperature. When to add the oil, how to read heat by sound, and which dishes want low heat instead.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
More of the same kind
More from this country
Sign in to edit.
Written with AI · how we check it · Edit history
https://cookiki.com/en/r/seblak · cookiki · User contributions are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.