In Indonesia, gado gado is everywhere. The nation’s famous vegetable salad can be found at restaurants and in home kitchens, as well as at the bustling food stalls that line city streets, where you can watch the dish materialize at the vendors’ expert hands.
Behind the Recipes
The Glories of Indonesian Gado Gado
There’s nothing like sambal kacang, the tangy, spicy, funky, rich peanut sauce that dresses Indonesia’s signature salad.
By and
Published June 4, 2024.
First is the sambal kacang, a sauce made to order.
A few handfuls of ingredients—fried peanuts, some garlic cloves and chiles, palm sugar, the pungent shrimp paste called terasi—are tossed into a wide stone vessel and pounded into a marvelously complex mash that is then transformed into a sauce with a few splashes of water.
Atop that comes a deluge of vegetables, from cucumbers to green beans to bitter melon, sliced to bite-size with a paring knife.
Next, some boiled eggs or perhaps boiled potatoes, leafy greens, fried tempeh or tofu, bean sprouts, or the compressed rice sticks known as lontong—the inclusions in both the salad and the sambal vary from region to region and from cook to cook.
In any case, the final step is always the same: an assertive toss (“gado gado” colloquially means “mix mix”) to mingle the components and coat each in the sauce. The peanut-scented jumble is then topped with something crunchy, maybe fried shallots or emping (a local seed-based cracker), and swiftly transferred into a folded sheet of paper or a banana leaf for eating on the go.
It’s refreshing, cool, nutty-rich, and funky—I can’t think of a more complex convenience food.
Sign up for the Cook's Insider newsletter
The latest recipes, tips, and tricks, plus behind-the-scenes stories from the Cook's Illustrated team.
America's Test Kitchen will not sell, rent, or disclose your email address to third parties unless otherwise notified. Your email address is required to identify you for free access to content on the site. You will also receive free newsletters and notification of America's Test Kitchen specials.
Tempeh: Indonesia’s Signature Vegetarian Protein
Gado gado is one of many Indonesian dishes that feature tempeh, a mildly earthy protein made of fermented soybeans. While tempeh has been adopted worldwide as a popular meat alternative, its origins can be traced back to early 18th-century Java. Tempeh is made by inoculating cooked whole soy beans with a fungus, whose mycelium binds the beans together into a dense cake. Today, firm, bumpy tempeh is prepared myriad ways in Indonesia—it can be deep-fried and dipped in sambal as a snack; braised in an aromatic, coconutty broth; or pan-fried and glazed with caramelized kecap manis.
A Salad with Strategy
Many recipes for gado gado call for three or more pots on the stove: one for the potatoes, one for the eggs, and a few for blanching vegetables. I saw no reason why all the boiling and blanching couldn’t happen in the same pot—that way, I’d use less equipment and wouldn’t have to tend to multiple components at the same time.
I filled a pot with water, brought it to a boil, and then cooked the ingredients one type at a time. First, I boiled half a dozen eggs and plunked them in an ice bath to halt their cooking. Next came baby potatoes, followed by green beans (which I shocked in the ice bath with the eggs) and then, finally, cabbage and bean sprouts.
I set the blanched vegetables on towel-lined trays to dry them and then popped them in the fridge to keep them crisp and cool. Cucumber slices and cherry tomatoes, which required knife work but no cooking, would round out the mix.
Only the tempeh required a separate vessel. This iconic Indonesian protein is typically sliced and fried for gado gado. After a brief sizzle in ¼ cup of oil in a skillet, the planks were crisp, ready to add their compelling nubbly texture and slight bitterness and acidity to the salad.
Dressed to Impress
When I spoke about gado gado with Lara Lee, the Chinese-Indonesian-Australian chef and author of titles including Coconut & Sambal (2020), she emphasized that there is one common thread that links all versions of the dish: “At the core of it, you’ve got a beautiful peanut sauce,” Lee said.
A mere salad dressing this is not. Voluptuous and lightly sweet, warmed by fresh chiles, and supported by umami funk, sambal kacang single-handedly transforms a humble bowl of vegetables into a hearty, nuanced meal. It is not lightly drizzled but lavished atop the vegetables, softening them in some places to create even more dimension in the bowl. “It gives you this amazing mix of textures,” Lee said.
A Marvelous, Multifaceted Sambal
There’s simply nothing like sambal kacang, the peanut-based sauce that tops gado gado (it also serves other functions in the Indonesian repertoire, such as a topping for fried dumplings or a dipping sauce for satay). At once fiery and sweet, mouth-filling and bright, and undergirded with fermented funk, this sauce is a complex cocktail of Indonesian flavors.
Recipes for sambal kacang have a wide range of complexity.
The simplest I found had a five‑item ingredient list; the most complex, eighteen. I decided to pick and choose among the various ingredients, as many home cooks do.
Tasters in my early tests were clearly inclined toward the addition of sweet, rich coconut milk; sour-fruity tamarind; floral lime leaves; and umami-rich fermented terasi. These became the pillars of my sauce. Thai chiles and garlic (both added raw for punchier flavor), palm sugar, lime juice, and kecap manis (Indonesia’s thick, sweet soy sauce) completed the profile.
To make the sauce’s peanutty base, many Indonesian cooks fry the legumes in oil and grind them with a mortar and pestle. This method delivered rich flavor and appealing texture, but commercial peanut butter made a fine, much simpler stand-in. As long as I used a chunky, natural peanut butter made with only peanuts and salt, I was able to imitate the fried-and-ground nuts.
The Complete Salad Cookbook
Rethink your idea of salad with this creative cookbook. With over 230 recipes, ingredient information, and tips, this is the only cookbook you'll ever need to make innovative, stunning, and satisfying salads.Buy Now
I blitzed the sauce ingredients in a food processor until smooth.
When sambal kacang is made fresh, the friction of the grinding process warms the sauce, which Lee says is an essential aspect of the dish. To mimic it, I briefly popped mine in the microwave. I also used the microwave to quickly fry a few sliced shallots in oil, creating a crispy topping for my salad in just a few minutes.
All the components of the dish can be prepped ahead and stored for a couple of days, allowing you to pull the dish together on demand. When the time comes, simply arrange the salad components, douse them in the sambal kacang, toss, and top with a sprinkle of fried shallots. If you’ve done your prep work ahead, you can have a meal that’s as convenient as it is complex.
