In the first part of this post we gave you the recipe to make a good batch of delicious – and often fiery – Balinese Sauce. In this part we’ll put it to good use to make two dishes, a Balinese-style saté and ayam betutu.
To make the Balinese style saté with this sauce, you need about 500 grams of a mince of your choosing: you can use seafood (saté lilit), chicken (saté ayam) and pork (saté babi), the most commonly used.
You’ll also need 500 grams of grated coconut, which our villa cook, Desak, grates straight from the coconut herself after ‘smoking’ the coconut shell over a burner on the stove before grating.
Desak uses a mortar and pestle to mix some of the sauce with some of the mince and coconut, gradually adding all of the ingredients, to make a paste of it. Handfulls of the mixture are then put around the bamboo or lemongrass ‘skewers’. The skewers can be refrigerated until needed.
Traditionally the saté skewers are cooked over charcoal and coconut to get a great smoky flavour (a job generally tended to by the men who rule the barbeque!), but they can also be cooked in a moderate to high oven.
For the second dish, ayam betutu, the chicken or duck (bebek betutu) is traditionally marinated, wrapped in a banana leaf, and steamed. The bird is then cooked over coals. An earlier version involves burying the bird, but what we’re after is a more practical version for you to make that doesn’t take hours but still tastes super.
This version is more about the sauce. And while Desak can practically grab a banana leaf out the kitchen window, she says the results can be inconsistent so she prefers to use foil – although I did see a recipe where the bird was wrapped in banana leave and then wrapped in aluminium foil, something I will try.
You should wash and dry the chicken before rubbing in the sauce. Add a couple of tablespoons of oil to the sauce and place some of the mix in the cavity of the chicken. Rub the rest of the sauce over the chicken and wrap the chicken in aluminium foil.
Leave the chicken for at least an hour before placing it in an oven preheated to 355˚F or 180˚C. Cooking time depends on the size of the bird, but you’re looking for a temperature of 180˚F or 82˚C for the bird for it to be cooked correctly.
Serve the chicken on its own or with some steamed rice. It should be one of the most succulent and tastiest chickens you’ve ever eaten in your life. I’m salivating just thinking about it!
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