January 23rd - Tempeh in Chile Garlic Tamarind Sauce

January 23rd Tempeh in Chile Ginger Tamarind Sauce
I like tempeh but confess that I don’t know a lot of ways to cook it. Tempeh, for those who don’t know, is a fermented soy product that originated in Indonesia, but doesn’t seem to be used much in many other Asian countries and seems virtually non-existent in traditional cooking from China, Thailand and Japan (as far as I can tell). It comes in small cakes of about 8-10 ounces and seems to be best when it’s sliced and cooked in oil before adding it to anything else. A lot of people say it has a mushroom-like flavor and it’s a good comparison, although it has its own flavor to me.
Because of its obscurity, there don’t seem to be many “authentic” (ie, Indonesian and Malaysian) tempeh recipes around. Most that I’ve seen come out of what I like to call the “hippie vegetarian” school and don’t’ sound very appetizing to me (tempeh-topped pizza or tempeh tacos, anyone?). My tempeh repertoire is pretty straight forward at this point and most of it comes from James Oseland’s Cradle of Flavor, which I’ve written about earlier. The recipes he lists are authentic and delicious.
Like all cooks, I substituted what I had on hand for what I recalled his recipe used. I started by cutting the tempeh into strips and then browned it in oil on both of the cut sides. I pulled it out of the pan, then added some red onion, green chili and ginger and sautéed them. Like many Asian dishes, it has a balance of sweet, sour and hot. To add the sour element, I degalezed the pan with some tamarind paste dissolved in water. Then I added some jiggery to give the contrasting sweet flavor. The original recipe called for galangal root, but I didn’t have any and used ginger (though I will agree with James Oseland that the two are not interchangeable and have very different flavors). I added the tempeh slices back in and let it reduce to a sweet sour syrup.
For a side dish, I stir fried some cabbage with garlic and red pepper and then served everything with basmati rice. I had a pint of the brown ale and it went nicely. The malt sweetness worked well with the chilis and was a nice contrast to the tanginess of the tamarind and the earthy notes of the tempeh. I need to learn to make other tempeh recipes, but so far this one has been a nice addition to my vegetarian repertoire.

Indonesian Food

Strangely enough, I grew up eating a fair amount of Indonesian food. My parents had lived there before my brother and I were born and my mother has a fairly solid range of dishes that hit a lot of the culinary highpoints. But it’s never been something that I cooked a lot of on my own. James Oseland’s book, Cradle of Flavor, may change all of that. This is a fairly recent book that covers food from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore and is terrific at pointing out the regional differences in all of these cuisines. The recipes are well written and clear, and the whole book is an entertaining read.

I read through various parts of the book the last few weeks and actually got around to cooking some dishes from it last weekend. I opted for three different recipes and actually followed the recipes, well more or less, but certainly more than I usually do, because it’s a cuisine whose subtleties I don’t understand well enough and wanted an “authentic” flavor in order to help get a handle on the flavor combinations. For this meal, I chose the chicken rendang, a Malaysian chicken curry with coconut milk, lemon grass, galangal, fresh turmeric, and lime leaves, caramelized tempeh and chiles, and stir fired greens with chili and garlic, all served with rice.

The chicken rendang was a rich dish with deep flavors of coconut with the punchier citrus notes of the lemon grass, and lime leaves. It was a terrific dish but I was happy that I made other dishes as well, because it might have been too rich on it’s own. The tempeh was a complete winner. My wife was a little wary of it because many tempeh recipes from “hippy” type of vegetarian cuisines are, quite frankly, a little scary. They seem to view tempeh as a meat substitute and think you can simply use it in place of meat, but it can be too earthy and funky in many dishes. This recipe calls for frying the tempeh and then creating a sauce of shallots, galangal, chiles, garlic, tamarind and palm sugar. The end result is a sweet sour and slightly hot glaze that works well with the earthier flavor of tempeh, but also doesn’t mask its actual flavor. It was a terrific recipe and changed both of our minds about tempeh. The stir fried greens, I chose baby bok choy, were simple. It’s a quick stir fry of greens in a chili and garlic scented oil. We’re lucky enough to have a great Asian grocery store near us with very good produce. The preparation was simple, and it enhanced the natural sweetness of the bok choy.

All three dishes worked well and all of the recipes were clear and easy to follow. The book is quite good in explaining certain flavor combinations and with more reading I hope that I start to understand the underlying combinations of the food from this area of the world. It’s a terrific book on a region that is under represented in my cookbook collection.