Indonesian Snack: Tempe Mendoan

Sometimes I miss living in Indonesia because you'll easily find delicious hawker foods in such a cheap price. I remembered I went a couple of times to go jogging in Gelora Bung Karno, a huge sport centre in central Jakarta, and we always finished the jogging by buying the Tempe Mendoan in a hawker stall nearby. 

Since there is no one selling snacks like that in here, I tried to make them by myself for today's snack. They were tasted as I expected, even though I still couldn't manage to cut the Tempe in very thin slices like the one the hawker's sold. For you who haven't tried Tempe Mendoan, the taste is salty and savory; and you can dip them with sweet soya sauce and bird chili cut or peanut sauce. The one I made today is using chili peanut sauce as dipping. 

Here's is my version of Tempe Mendoan:

The recipe is as follow:

Tempe Mendoan (for about 10 pcs)

Ingredients:

100 gr tempe, sliced into thin wide pieces

1/2 stems of scallion, cut into small pieces

50 gr rice flour

1/2 tablespoon flour

50 ml water

oil

1 garlic cloves

1/2 pc of shallot or a little bit of red onion

1/2 teaspoon coriander

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/2 tablespoon salt

Method:

1. Crush and mix the garlic cloves, shallot, coriander, pepper and salt in a mortar until all the ingredients are smooth.
2. Add the rice flour and regular flour to the mortar
3. Add half of the water, mix until well combined, if the batter is too thick, add more water. I prefer the batter a little bit thick to create more texture to the tempe.
4. Add scallion to the batter and mix them well.
5. Dip tempe into the batter until the batter cover all of its surface
6. Deep fried the tempe, but remove them from pan before they are turn crunchy.

For the peanut sauce, I used this recipe:

Chili Peanut Sauce

Ingredients:

1 tbsp of peanut butter (I used the crunchy type)

1 red chili

1 bird chili

1 garlic clove

1 shallot

salt

brown sugar

lime leaves

oil

water

sweet soya sauce

lemon

Method:

1. Crush and mix the red chili, garlic clove, shallot, brown sugar and salt in a mortar.
2. Add the peanut butter and mix them well
3. Stir fry them in a sauce pan with a little bit of oil
4. Add the lime leaves
5. Add water as necessary (to get the appropriate thickness)
6. Remove from sauce pan and add sweet soya sauce and lemon until you get the taste as expected. If the peanut sauce is too thick, you can always add hot water to lighten it.

Good luck trying!

Cheers,

Indispensable Lady