Gado Gado
Gado-gado is one of Indonesia's most favourite dish everywhere in the world. It is actually vegetable salad dressed in specially prepared peanut sauce. In Indonesia, there are a few dish that resemble gado-gado (with the same kind, or a variation of peanut sauce), such as pecel, lotek, and ketoprak. Pecel and lotek is the closest to gado-gado, so people often mistake them as gado-gado.
Preparation of gado-gado is mainly the preparation of the peanut sauce. There are many gado-gado recipes in the Internet, but most of them advice the use of peanut butter or freshly fried peanut grinded with a blender. But the original traditional Indonesian gado-gado uses cobek batu (Indonesian style stone pestle). This is one of the ingenous Indonesian food preparation technique.
The pestle makes the peanuts not to become too soft and produce a certain kind of flavor which cannot be achieved by using blender or peanut butter. Using a pestle is not just crunching the peanuts but also mixes them with all other ingredients. To do pestling is not to pound but to grind and mix all ingredients together in circular hand movement with enough pressure to crush all ingredients. In Indonesia, this is called uleg or ulek, a technique used in making varieties of indonesian food. You need some practice before you can do pestling the correct way.
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