An original Malaysian recipe for Chicken Satay. Rustic, kampung Style 🙂 If you can get your hands on the ingredients, this dish from Malaysia is a great twist for your next barbecue.
I know 3 different types of satay: Malay, Indonesian and that weird stuff you get served in restaurants in Europe. I’ve never had really good satay served in Europe, unfortunately. Especially the sauce… The peanut sauce still needs to be coarse. And peanut butter does not belong in it at all. Real satay tastes all the better! Both types, Indonesian and Malaysian, are delicious. When I have a choice, I prefer Malay satay!
Ingredients for the chicken satay marinade
As always, good ingredients are important when cooking. What turned out to be surprisingly difficult: in India, it is very hard to buy the stalks of lemongrass. You can get the actual lemongrass (popular ingredient in masala chai), but you can really only buy the stalks fresh in the store in a mixture of Thai herbs. The quality is okay.
Since I didn’t want to have tons of the other ingredients at home and end up throwing them away, I only bought one package and used dried lemongrass for the rest. By now I have found out that you can probably order them fresh online.
Working with the roots is an experience in itself 🙂 Galangal is rock hard and from the turmeric my hands are still yellow after 3x washing. If this bothers you, it’s best to wear gloves. Please make sure to grate the roots by hand, otherwise you will destroy your blender, especially with the galangal. In 5 minutes the small amount is easily grated by hand.
With this recipe for satay skewers the satay sauce made from peanuts is the perfect match. You can find the one without peanut butter here :-).
Authentic Malay Chicken Satay
Equipment
- Blender
Ingredients
- wooden skewers watered
- ½ bulb garlic (bulb, not clove!)
- 3 stalks lemongrass
- 1 ½ in turmeric root grated
- 1 in galangal root grated
- 5 g coriander powder
- 25 g fennel powder
- 25 g turmeric powder
- 10 g cumin powder
- ½ cup palm sugar
- ½ cup sugar
- 1 ½ Tbsp salt
- 1 kg boneless chicken preferably deboned thigh
Instructions
- Coarsely chop the garlic, onion and lemongrass.
- Finely grate the galangal and turmeric root.
- Blend all the ingredients (but the chicken) in a blender.
- Marinate the meat with the spice mixture and refrigerate for at least 4 hours.
- Before skewering the meat, soak the wooden skewers in cold water for an hour (or use metal skewers). This will help the meat detach from the skewers later after grilling.
- Brush the meat with oil on both sides. Alternatively to using a brush, you can use a piece of crushed lemongrass. This saves the tedious cleaning of the brush.
- Then grill the meat over high heat for 5 minutes on each side.
- Serve together with peanut sauce, rice and cubes of cucumber.
Please rate my recipe before you leave 🙂:
Not to be missed, the original source of the recipe by chef Dato’ Ismail Ahmad. Cooked with love on From zero to curry.
