gado gado | Sieved

On Sunday Freya painted all day, I gardened all day; and we were both excellently productive.

For dinner I decided to make another tofu dish. We still had 2 packs left that were ‘just’ out of date and I hate throwing food away. I checked a few cookbooks, and found a Gado Gado recipe in Ottolenghi’s Plenty cookbook. We didn’t have all the ingredients for the whole dish but we did have all the ingredients for the sauce. I was sure I could cobble something together with all the ‘on edge’ leftovers that I had knocking about. At least half the dish could be made – that would do I thought!

Had I read ahead, and read more carefully, I probably wouldn’t have started this sauce so late in the day. It takes at least 90 minutes to make, probably longer. We decided to snack on leftover pork and mash instead and put this sauce aside for another day. Just as well really. It was very hot. Too hot for Freya anyway. She wouldn’t have been impressed at having this smothered all over her dinner. As it happens it wasn’t that hot when I used it for real the next day! Perhaps the tasting spoon was covered in chillies!

The last time I made a sauce that took this long was during a Cookery Course at Loaf in Birmingham. We were making a Massaman curry and had to pound all sorts of spices and chillies and garlic in a very big pestle and mortar for about an hour! I recall asking why you couldn’t just blast it all in a Thermomix, but apparently whacking something releases more flavour. It probably did – but it did seem like a lot of effort.

This doesn’t require any whacking, just a lot of stirring and adding ingredients.

The sauce has garlic, lemongrass, sambal oelek (Indonesian chilli paste), ginger and shallots; all which are blitzed (in a Thermomix (smiley face)) and fried off in oil for almost an hour. You add sweet paprika, sugar, seasoning, tamarind, coconut milk and ‘boiled peanuts’ and keep cooking for some more time. It is worth it honest. It just takes time. Boiling unsalted peanuts for half an hour was definitely something I was glad I read in advance; at least there was some multitasking!

As I said before it is hot; hotter than I expected, but very easily fixed with more coconut cream or yoghurt. It suited my tastes but it isn’t all about me.

This made lots. Four jars worth to be precise. I hope it keeps otherwise that was a lot of effort for nothing. On the plus side our go-to ‘istu 20 minute meal’ of tofu with peanut sauce can probably be modified a little to accommodate this sauce rather than the one in their book.

Would I make this again? Possibly. Are there easier satay sauces out there – most definitely!

These two dishes are essentially the same – just subtly different. Both are salt and pepper tofu, just the accompaniments differ. But why so much tofu?!

Even before lockdown we planned all our meals at least a week in advance. We had bought three packs of tofu to cook meals from the ‘itsu 20 minute cookbook’ – my favourite of the ‘really really quick’ meals books I own.

Due to skipping a couple of meals and the ‘leg of lamb that lasted 4 days’ saga we skipped the tofu meals in favour of food that was closer to expiry. Obviously you can’t do this forever – tofu has a lifespan too – and we ended up with out of date tofu!

Whilst watching Australian Masterchef Season 12 (it’s on – watch it – it is sooooo good) one of the competitors made a tofu dish where they served it cold, pressed, uncooked, raw basically. I wasn’t impressed – so I decided to come up with something myself.

All I have done here is press the tofu for an hour, toss it in white pepper, sea salt and cornflour and fried it until a little bit crispy. Using white pepper allows for a more subtle peppery flavour – black pepper can be overpowering if you use too much!

The one on the left is fried in left over pork fat (from a dish I made the other day) and the one on the left if fried in olive oil. The pork fat one was much more crispy – but obviously far less vegetarian.

The one on the left has pickled red onion (slice and leave in white wine vinegar), sushi rice, steamed broccoli, cucumber and red chilli – and a little herby sauce (left over from another meal).

The one of the right is just boiled new potatoes, hard boiled egg, cucumber, radishes, braised red cabbage, more pickled red onion – and a Satay sauce from the Gado Gado recipe from Ottolenghi’s Plenty cookbook. The meal is almost the Gado Gado recipe but it is supposed to have green beans, bean sprouts, croutons and crispy onions – which I didn’t have to hand. I will try it again when I next plan some meals. The addition of the crunchy stuff will definitely make this a better meal.

The Satay sauce took forever to make – and I’ll talk about this another time. Suffice to say it took at least 90 minutes to make, is very very nice – and was more spicy than I expected.

One more pack of tofu left! Let us see what we are having later today!