Week 3 - Indonesian

The last time the Indonesian challenge came up (in 2015), I tried to make nasi goreng, and while it tasted like fried rice, it didn't taste like any nasi goreng we had had before. It was just missing something. For the Indonesian challenge this time, I wanted to make something different. I looked through lots and lots of delicious-sounding recipes, but wasn't sure what to make since there were many ingredients I didn't have access to, especially during a pandemic when we couldn't shop around at specialty stores. I eventually decided on mie goreng, a fried noodle dish, based on a recipe I found on Recipes Indonesia. Even though I knew I would need to make substitutions, it at least seemed doable. Also, unlike the last time I did the Indonesian challenge, this time I had a bottle of kecap manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce) and didn't have to try to fake the flavor with other things.

I made a lot of substitutions, perhaps too many since the finished product (spoiler alert) wasn't like any mie goreng we had eaten in Indonesian restaurants before. (If you think this is sounding like a repeat of last time's nasi goreng, you would be right.) We couldn't get to an Asian grocery store before making this, so the only noodles we had were spaghetti. I used a can of chicken instead of an actual chicken fillet, trying to save a little money since our grocery bill that week was higher than usual. Instead of slicing up my own cabbage and carrots, I got coleslaw mix, something we've used as a substitution before when cooking that has done well. Instead of choy sum, I used a little baby bok choy. The store had no bean sprouts. I left out the chiles, except a little bit of sambal, because I didn't want it to be too spicy for B. We left out the eggs because of our allergy, fried onions, and parsley. With all the ingredient changes, it was a somewhat different dish, but they all seemed like similar enough substitutions that could potentially work at the time I planned it out.

Non-traditional ingredients for mie goreng

The ingredients for our version were:

- 1 package of whole wheat spaghetti ($1.39)

- 1 tbsp grapeseed oil ($0.10)

- 3 large shallots ($1.43)

- 6 cloves of garlic ($0.33)

- 1 can of chicken ($1.92)

- 1 bag of coleslaw mix (green cabbage, red cabbage, carrots) ($2.99)

- 1 baby bok choy ($0.75)

- 7 scallions ($0.99)

- 1 small spoonful of sambal oelek ($0.05)

- about 1 tsp chicken bouillon ($0.10)

- about 3 tbsp kecap manis ($0.84)

- about 2 tsp soy sauce ($0.10)

- white pepper to taste ($0.05)

The noodles cost about $11.04 on their own. We ate them with some stir-fried bok choy and red onion on the side that I made in the same wok right afterwards, and they tasted pretty good together. The total cost was about $13.73, a great price for dinner for three and a lot of food. There was a (very) little bit left for the next day.

I generally followed the same procedure to make the noodles as the original recipe, but with a couple of significant differences. One was skipping all the egg-related steps. The other was that, instead of grinding the shallots and garlic into a paste, I just fried them in the oil. I didn't have time to make a paste, and we only had a wooden mortar and pestle that I didn't want to forever smell like shallots and garlic. It probably would have been better as a paste, but I don't think it would have made so much of a difference as to change our final conclusions on our version of the dish. The steps we followed were:

The original recipe said five shallots, but this was three shallots, so I stopped there. Thankful for the goggles we bought and never used for COVID, because they have become onion and shallot goggles...

1. Prep - finely chop shallots, finely chop garlic, rough chop baby bok choy, chop scallion greens and whites into medium-sized pieces and keep separated, make sauce by combining the chicken bouillon, kecap manis, and soy sauce, boil water for spaghetti. [I started that last one way too late, which delayed everything and made our vegetables a little too soft.]

2. Heat grapeseed oil in a hot wok. Add shallots and garlic. Fry until fragrant.

3. Add chicken, stir-fry for a little bit, and then add the sambal oelek. [If using actual chicken fillets, this would obviously be a much longer step until the chicken was mostly cooked.]

4. Add the coleslaw mix, baby bok choy, and scallion whites. Stir-fry until beginning to soften. [That was the intention, but getting to step 5 took far longer since the water wasn't boiling yet.]

5. Add noodles, scallion greens, and sauce. Mix everything together well, and make sure sauce is evenly distributed. Adjust to taste. [It was a little too bland for us, probably because we had so much stuff in the wok. We added more kecap manis and more soy sauce here as well as a little white pepper.]

The noodles were good, a little on the blander side but with a nice mild flavor. They were not, however, something we would have ever guessed as mie goreng in a taste test. Similar to our last Indonesian cooking experiment, it just felt like there was something missing, and I'm really not sure what it was. The chiles? Too little sambal? Not enough sauce? Too much/too many noodles in the wok? They just tasted like lo mein to us with nothing distinctly Indonesian. Maybe next time I try making Indonesian rice or noodles, I'll finally get it right.