Sri Owen’s Balinese Pork Satay

And now for something completely different. One of the great things about being all grown up and stuff, is that, without even really trying, you amass a proper selection of spices, bottles, and things, like tamarind paste. Suddenly, those Asian recipes, with their intimidatingly long list of ingredients require a trip to the cupboard, and not a bus ride to a nicer part of town that you can afford to live in, and a visit to Waitrose. The upside is that now I regularly cook delicious Indian food, and sometimes Chinese too. The downside is that I’ve become incredibly fussy about takeaways. On balance, it’s definitely more good than bad.

The Indonesian recipes in this book are long, and with much ingredient crossover with Indian and Thai food. I’m pleased to say the only things I had to buy for this pork satay was the meat (bog standard mystery mince, though, not tenderloin as Sri Owen specified) and the onion. Everything else was to hand. And it was flipping gorgeous.

I hadn’t really heard of Sri Owen, but the book convincingly sells her as a semi-doyenne of food writing in the UK. She writes interestingly about her experiences as a child (and eater) in pre-war Indonesia, as an ambitious young woman, and then young wife of an English academic, and then as an evangelist for Indonesian food in the UK and Italy from the 60s until today. And she presents an extensive selection of recipes for all occasions, including the famous rendangs and satays.

Much of it looked tricky – I don’t know where to get banana leaves, I don’t buy giant raw prawns on the grounds of sustainability, and the reliance on candlenuts (to be substituted with macademia nuts here) and peanuts ruled out many recipes in this nut-allergic house. But this pork satay jumped out at me on the grounds of mince! (frugal), tamarind! (got a massive pot), ginger! (so yum), and all kinds of ingredients  that I knew were going to be good together. Plus, pork doesn’t feature much in many Asian cuisines, so the change was tempting. Needless to say, pork doesn’t appear in much Indonesian food: this recipe is specifically Balinese. I am pitifully poorly travelled, so my food has to do it for me - how could I resist bringing the flavours of that luscious sounding island into a wet Wednesday evening in Streatham?

I deviated slightly from the recipe in terms of quantity and method (the only ingredient I didn’t have was galangal) – I didn’t use skewers because the mixture looked dangerously wet. I suppose next time (and there will be a next time) I should reduce the amount of spice paste, or up the meat. But this turned out seriously juicy, and I’m not sure I’d want to jeopardise that.

Serves two, generously, with rice. The amount of paste would definitely stretch to 500g, maybe even 750g of meat.

350 g minced pork
A small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ tsp chili powder (I don’t think more would hurt)
Knobble of ginger (you know how much you like)
1 lemongrass stalk
1 tsp coriander seeds
½ tsp cumin seeds
2 green cardamom pods
A shard of cassia bark or half a cinnamon stick
pinch of grated nutmeg
1 tsp of tamarind paste with 2tsp of water
1 tsp salt
½ tsp brown sugar
1 tbsp of low flavour oil (I used rapeseed)

Using a food processor, or stick blender, whizz all the ingredients other than the pork, into a paste.

Add the meat and stir to combine. Let the meat marinate in the fridge for as long as you’ve got.

About an hour before you want to cook, take the meat out of the fridge. If you’re going to use sticks you can either form meatballs and thread them on or mould the meat onto the sticks like proper satay (I bet this is trickier than it looks). Because my mixture looks a little wet and loose (I’m sorry) I decided not to risk them falling off the sticks – so they were just unthreaded meatballs.

Grill the meatballs for around 10 minutes, turning them, and brushing them with oil as necessary. Serve with rice, and an Asiany salad – I made a dressing of sesame oil, soy sauce, lime juice, and sugar. It wasn’t quite right, but it was in the ballpark.