Urap (Blanched Vegetables in Spiced Grated Coconut)

Variations

• Urap sayur: the Balinese name. Much the same, sometimes with turmeric root in place of the galangal.
• The vegetables are not fixed: a Javanese market cook uses what is cheap that morning. Sprouts, water spinach and long beans are the spine; young cassava leaf, papaya flower and fern shoots all turn up. The one rule is to keep wet things out — no cucumber, no tomato.
• Raw: very young vegetables are sometimes dressed without blanching. You keep the crunch, but the coconut clings less, so thicken the dressing a little.
• With dried coconut: no fresh flesh to hand, soak 100g of unsweetened desiccated coconut in 100ml of hot water for 10 minutes. Less aroma, same structure. Not the sweetened kind.
• With tumpeng: the proper place for it is around a cone of yellow rice, where this one dish is the whole vegetable course of a feast.

Tips

• This is the Indonesian dish that never presses its coconut. Rendang takes the other end as far as it goes: "The coconut milk splitting is the doneness sign, where elsewhere it is the failure to avoid." Making milk means pulling the fat and water out of the flesh and discarding the flesh. Here the flesh is the dish. With nothing extracted there is no emulsion to break, and the oil and aroma stay inside the shreds and burst as you chew them.
• Do not confuse it with kerak telor's serundeng. That is the same grated coconut dry-fried brown in a pan and scattered on top, and as that page notes, "Serundeng keeps a week in a jar, so it is worth making a big batch." The coconut here never browns. It stays white, stays damp, and coats rather than being sprinkled — the same ingredient in two different states.
• Steamed, not fried. Oil makes the shreds stick together and takes the colour, which is the road to serundeng. Steam takes the raw bite out of the garlic and shallot and leaves the coconut white and moist. Ten minutes is enough; longer and it starts to dry.
• Blanch each vegetable separately. Twenty seconds for sprouts against two minutes for beans is a factor of six. In one pot together, one of them is always wrong (blanching vegetables).
• Wringing the vegetables out is the pressure point. Grated coconut is close to a dry sponge. It takes up whatever water the vegetables carry, swells, tastes of less, and leaves a white pool in the bottom of the dish. There is no way back from that, so do not hurry this step.
• Mix with your hands. A spoon presses and this wants lifting. Sprouts and leaves have little structure, and once they break they release water — which is the problem in the line above.
• Do not make it ahead. Blanched vegetables keep giving up water while the terasi and raw garlic go the other way and fade. Two hours is the practical limit (serving temperature).