Peanut sauce, satay sauce, bumbu kacang, sambal kacang, or pecel is a sauce made from ground roasted or fried peanuts, widely used in cuisines worldwide. Peanut sauce is used with chicken, meat and vegetables, adding flavor to grilled skewered meat, such as satays, poured over vegetables as salad dressing such as in gado-gado, or as dipping sauce.
Ingredients
The main ingredient is ground roasted peanuts, for which peanut butter can act as a substitute. Several different recipes for making peanut sauces exist, resulting in a variety of flavours, textures and consistency. A typical recipe usually contains ground roasted peanuts or peanut butter, coconut milk, soy sauce, tamarind, galangal, garlic, and spices. Other possible ingredients are chili peppers, sugar, fried onion, and lemongrass. The texture and consistency of a peanut sauce corresponds to the amount of water being mixed in it. In Western countries, the readily and widely available peanut butter is often used as a substitute ingredient to make peanut sauce. To achieve authenticity, some recipes might insist on making roasted ground peanuts from scratch, using traditional stone mortar and pestle for grinding to achieve desired texture, graininess and earthy flavour of peanut sauce. This sauce is popularly applied on chicken skewers, beef satay or warm noodles.
Regional
Indonesia
One of the main characteristics of Indonesian cuisine is the wide applications of bumbu kacang in many Indonesian signature dishes, such as satay, gado-gado, karedok, ketoprak, rujak and pecel. It is usually added to main ingredients to add taste, used as dipping sauce such as sambal kacang for otak-otak or ketan or as a dressing on vegetables. Satays are commonly served with peanut sauce. However, satay doesn't actually mean peanut sauce – Southeast Asia’s favourite street food snack is a dish of skewered, grilled meat with infinite variations. Introduced from Mexico by Portuguese and Spanish merchants in the 16th century, peanuts found a place within Indonesian cuisine as a popular sauce. Peanuts thrived in the tropical environment of Southeast Asia, and today, they can be found roasted and chopped finely, topping a variety of dishes and in marinades and dipping sauces. Peanut sauce reached its sophistication in Indonesia, with the delicate balance of taste acquired from various ingredients according to each recipe of peanut sauce; fried peanuts, gula jawa, garlic, shallot, ginger, tamarind, lemon juice, lemongrass, salt, chilli, pepper, sweet soy sauce, ground together and mixed with water to acquire the right texture. The secret to good peanut sauce is "not too thick and not too watery." Indonesian peanut sauce tends to be less sweet than the Thai one. Gado-gado is eaten with peanut sauce throughout Indonesia showcasing the delicate balance of sweet, spicy and sour.
The Netherlands adopted peanut sauce as a common side dish through its former colonization of South East Asia. Besides being used in certain traditional Indonesian and Dutch-Indonesian dishes, it has found its way in to a purely Dutch context when it is eaten during, for instance, a barbecue or with French fries. A popular combination at Dutch fast food outlets is French fries with mayonnaise and peanut sauce, called a Patat Oorlog. Peanut sauce is also eaten with baguette, bread, cucumber or potatoes. It is also used as an ingredient in the deep-fried snack food called Satékroket, a croquette made with a flour-thickened ragout based on Indonesian satay.
