Gado Gado

I should probably be writing about Texas barbeque this week. There’s about seven pounds of beef in Chase’s oven right now, slow-cooking in its own fat behind an oven door taped shut with a “Leave Closed” note (the whole process takes about six hours, and neither of us are very good at hands-off cooking). Last night the kitchen counter was covered with at least half a dozen colorful spices that would become part of a powerful dry rub, after lots of tinkering and ratio adjusting. It’s all quite exciting.

But I’ve been writing about meat a lot, and Texas seems to come up disturbingly frequently, and I feel like it’s time to get back to my roots. I’ve never eaten a lot of meat; I’m not from Texas, and I never will be. I’m also not from Indonesia, but I decided to make gado gado anyway.

Since Chase was providing the main dish for today’s picnic, I thought I should contribute a “side,” an all-important part of Texas barbeque. Rudy’s, a Hill Country establishment and the setting of one of my favorite nights in San Antonio, serves creamed corn, coleslaw, and potato salad along with their brisket, and I could have tried out any number of Southwestern recipes that probably would have been delicious. But I’d been meaning to make gado gado all summer, and I enjoyed the subtle rebellion in the idea of bringing it to a brisket-inspired picnic.

Gado gado comes in many shapes and forms, but it’s essentially a salad of steamed vegetables with a chili peanut sauce. Typical ingredients include mung bean sprouts, green beans, carrots, tofu, hard-boiled eggs, and potatoes, but how they're prepared and served varies considerably. Given the flexibility of the dish, it seemed reasonable to turn it into a mostly-potato barbeque side. Having eaten more of the bag of potatoes during the week than intended, I bulked it up with steamed green beans, shaved carrots, and cucumber slices, and although it didn’t look remotely like American potato salad, the colors formed an appetizing combination.

Then there’s the peanut dressing, the component that turns a simple bowl of vegetables into gado gado. The bottled kind they sell at Ranch 99 in El Cerrito was my introduction to the undeniable goodness of combining peanuts and chili, and the delicious complexity of Indonesian spices. In New York I get it at an Indonesian grocery store in Chinatown, somewhere in the vicinity of the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. The very helpful proprietor sells it in dehydrated blocks, and will always ask you if you’re sure you like spicy things before accepting your money. The block form is useful because you can determine the thickness of the sauce yourself; I make it thick to use as a dip for roasted potatoes or carrots, or thinner as a sauce for noodle dishes. Either way, all you have to do is add boiling water and stir vigorously until it looks right.

The second best part about serving gado gado (I’ll leave it to you to guess what the best part is) is telling people what’s in front of them and watching them try to figure out if the syllables they think they’ve heard should mean something to them. There’s no need for further explanation (barring peanut allergy precautions) – no one questions gado gado after they’ve tried it.

Gado Gado Picnic Salad

-Six(ish) baby Yukon gold potatoes
-Several handfuls of green beans (about a cereal bowl’s worth)
-Medium-sized carrot, grated or shaved with a vegetable peeler
-Two Persian cucumbers, or half an English cucumber
-Gado gado dressing

Boil the potatoes until fork-tender, remove from water and set aside to cool. Blanche green beans in the same water for three minutes, drain and add to carrot gratings. Slice cucumber into half moons. When the potatoes have cooled, chop into bite-sized chunks. Mix all vegetables together and add sauce. If using dehydrated gado gado, smash about a third of the block into fine crumbs, then add a small amount of boiling water to form an even paste. Add more water until salad dressing-like consistency is reached. Toss the vegetables with the sauce to coat evenly.