GADO-GADO

Gado-gado is a traditional dish in Indonesian cuisine, and comprises a vegetable salad served with a peanut sauce dressing. It is widely served from hawkers carts, stalls (warung), and small restaurants up to star hotels restaurants in Indonesia, and in Indonesian restaurants in other countries.

Gado-gado is part of a wider family of Indonesian peanut sauce - salad; with lotek, pecel and karedok. Some of salad's peanut sauce is made in individual batches, fresh in front of the customers (like the picture on the right - which should say the way lotek is prepared), however gado-gado sauce is made a head of time and cooked in bulk). Compare to Western salads, gado-gado has much more sauce in it (the vegetable should be well coated in the sauce)

For the convenience of modern world, both gado-gado and pecel sauce is available in block of dried sauce that can easily be made liquid by adding warm water.

Ingredients

Vegetable salad

The exact composition of the vegetable salad varies, but usually comprises some form of mixture of

* blanched - shredded, chopped, or sliced green vegetables such as cabbage, watercress, and bean sprouts, young boiled jack fruit, and string bean, bitter melon; in other places even carrot is added;
* uncooked - sliced cucumber and lettuce
* fried tofu and tempeh;
* sliced boiled potatoes; and
* peeled and sliced boiled eggs.
* kerupuk and emping (indonesian style fried crackers, the latter is made from melinjo)
* fried onion

In addition to the vegetables, several kinds crackers and fried onion are added to give crunchiness to the dish. One of the most important ingredient is Limo lime. Without this lime, gado-gado does not have the smell of a real gado-gado, at least for the Jakarta style gado-gado.

In Indonesia gado-gado is a main dish and is usually served with rice, lontong (rice cake in banana leave wrapped) or ketupat (rice cake in bamboo wrapped). In western style setting it is usually served with nothing else as salad.

Peanut sauce dressing

What distinguishes gado-gado from a plain vegetable salad is the peanut sauce dressing, which is poured on top of the vegetable salad before serving. The composition of this peanut sauce varies as well. One may use a commercial Indonesian peanut sauce or satay sauce, or make the sauce oneself. For making the sauce, the common primary ingredients are as follows:

* ground fried peanuts with most of the oil drained off
* spices
* coconut sugar/palm sugar (can substitute brown sugar)
* chilies (according to taste).
* limo lime juice (this is indispensable).
* terasi (dried shrimp/fish paste)
* tamarind water.

Note the above is for Jakarta style gado-gado.