Chicken Sateh / Kipsaté / Sate Ayam

I had chicken satay at a Thai restaurant the other day - I was quite happy to see that on the menu, it's perhaps my favourite chicken dish. But Thai chicken satay is not like the dish I've grown up on, which is the Indonesian version (well, one of the islands' version, but I'm too ignorant of Indonesia to know exactly which. Probably Java).

As luck would have it, I have a brilliant "Indisch" (Dutch-Indonesian fusion cuisine) cookery book, plus our family recipe for saté sauce. So I'll post it here for other people to make use of.

In the interest of vegetarianism (I'm currently contemplating actually making the move from a little meat to non-meat diet), I must post here that this dish also works well with tofu and chicken substitutes.

It can also be made with other meats, such as pork (babi), goat (kambing), shrimp (udang), and, for those so inclined (perhaps fewer Brits than Continental Europeans, who are far less difficult about horse meat), horse (kuda). Those are slightly different recipes though, and I restrict this recipe to chicken (ayam) / tofu / substitute only.

The Indische chicken sateh dish consists of two elements; the chicken and the sauce.

Chicken:
All you need to do for this is to cut chicken breast into cubes and stick it in a marinade to soak overnight.

Here's the marinade for 500 grams of chicken.

3 tablespoons of ketjap manis / dark soy sauce (if you can get it, ketjap manis. If not, dark soy sauce is a good enough substitute. The differences, though they are different, are fairly minor).
3 tablespoons of lemon juice.
2 tablespoons of peanut oil / vegetable oil (again, peanut oil is preferable, but vegetable oil works well enough).
1 teaspoon of pepper
salt to taste (remember soy sauce is already fairly salty)

So soak the chicken overnight in the fridge, then either shallow-fry the cubes or stick them on a skewer (wet the skewers if you're using wooden ones!), then on a grill.

Sauce:
Okay, so this is the family recipe for the simple version. The difficult version involves crushing peanuts to a powder and all that sort of nonsense. So this works well enough.

Get a small jar (300 grams) of smooth peanut butter. Not chunky. Smooth. It needs to be relatively oily too, so if you've got a 'dry' peanut butter, you need to add some peanut / vegetable oil to the recipe. You'll want to use half this jar.

Chop chillies, or use chilli paste - preferably sambal ulek/oelek, but that's so hard to get. Chillies and chilli paste work well too. Mix this with a pinch of ground ginger and a pinch of ground coriander.

Fry a diced and cubed onion with two chopped cloves of garlic (or more, if you like garlic). Add the spice mix. Then add the peanut butter and add milk and water, until everything has dissolved and the sauce has a sauce-like consistency. Add a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of ketjap manis / dark soy sauce, two tablespoons of lemon juice, a pinch of salt, and a 1 cm^3 cube of creamed coconut. Tweak the amounts of milk, peanut butter, chillies and spices until it is just the way you like it.

Serve over the chicken cubes, or with chips, or over nasi goreng or other rice dishes, or whatever you like because you'll want to stick this peanut sauce on just about everything. 

And that's it. Bon appétit.