This Padang style eggs recipe for gulai telur Pedang makes a spicy coconut milk-based egg curry from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Made with boiled eggs simmered in coconut milk and an aromatic spice paste pounded from fresh galangal, turmeric, ginger, garlic, shallots and chillies, this fragrant egg curry is served with crispy shallots and steamed rice.
Our Padang style eggs recipe will make you a delicious Indonesian egg curry called gulai telur Pedang – ‘gulai’ is curry, ‘telur’ is ‘egg’ and Padang is the capital city of West Sumatra. Home to the Minangkabau people, the cuisine is called Minang food or Padang food, or masakan Padang to Indonesians, and it’s incredibly delicious.
Consisting of boiled eggs in a spicy coconut milk based gravy that’s redolent of fragrant spices, and sprinkled with crispy fried shallots, gulai telur Pedang might be served simply with steamed rice – or it might come as one element of a full spread of breakfast dishes that typically includes fried fish in batter, potato fritters and a tomato-based sambal.
This Padang style eggs recipe for gulai telur Pedang is this week’s edition of our Weekend Eggs recipe series of breakfast dishes from around the world, which we launched with Grantourismo and our year-long global grand tour aimed at promoting more slow, local and experiential forms of travel back in 2010.
If you haven’t visited us in a while, Weekend Eggs recipes we’ve published in our re-booted breakfast eggs series include the Chinese-American egg foo young with gravy, the original Cantonese-style egg foo young from southern China, a breakfast burritoa classic Mexican huevos rancheros, a Mexican migas recipe with a twist for a ‘Migas tortilla’, fried eggs breakfast taco with chorizo, crunchy potatoes and spicy chorizo oil, scrambled eggs breakfast taco recipe with avocado and chorizo, Basque fried eggs with chorizo and potatoes recipe for ‘messy eggs’, and Mexico City-inspired chorizo eggs.
We’ve also published eggs recipes for a Thai fried egg salad called yam khai dao, pesto scrambled eggs, a Japanese rolled omelette, scrambled eggs with sauteed mushrooms, soft scrambled eggs with Chinese pork and chives, Indian egg bhurji, Chinese marbled tea eggs, corn fritter breakfast burgers, Russian devilled eggs, Turkish çılbır poached eggs and menemen scrambled eggs, Calabria’s take on ‘eggs in purgatory’ with ’nduja, Thai son-in-law eggs, Thai omelette kai jiaw, Cambodian steamed eggs, and Malaysia and Singapore’s half-boiled eggs with kaya jam and toast.
Before I tell you more about this Padang style eggs recipe, we have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-funded. If you’ve cooked our recipes and enjoyed them, please consider supporting Grantourismo by using our links to buy travel insurance, rent a car or campervan or motorhome, book accommodation, or book a tour on Klook or Get Your Guide. You could also browse our Grantourismo store for gifts for food lovers, including food-themed reusable cloth face masks designed with my images.
Another option is to support our epic Cambodian cuisine history and cookbook on Patreon; or buy us a coffee, although we’ll probably use our coffee money to buy cooking ingredients for recipe testing; or buy something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers, James Beard award-winning cookbooks, cookbooks by Australian chefs, classic cookbooks for serious cooks, travel books to inspire wanderlust, and gifts for Asian food lovers and picnic lovers. Now let me tell you about this Padang style eggs recipe.
Padang Style Eggs Recipe for Gulai Telur Pedang
It was about time we shared this Padang style eggs recipe for gulai telur Pedang, which makes a wonderfully fragrant egg curry that you’re going to love if you’ve enjoyed other egg curries, such as this traditional Burmese egg curry recipe we shared from our favourite Burmese cookbook Cook and Entertain the Burmese Way (1978) by Mi Mi Khaing.
Also a breakfast favourite, the Burmese egg curry recipe makes quite a different egg curry dish to this Padang style eggs recipe. As Terence sees it, the Burmese eggs dish is a cousin to Thai son-in-law eggs and the many versions of Chinese tiger skin eggs.
Mi Mi Khaing’s Burmese egg curry recipe will give you golden-coloured deep-fried boiled eggs in a spicy tomato and onion-based curry. Interestingly, both Padang cuisine and Indonesian cuisines more generally have very similar egg curries but this Padang style eggs recipe for gulai telur Pedang is not one of them.
We’ll share some of the other Indonesian egg curry recipes in the near future. Update: we’ve since published another coconut milk-based Indonesian egg curry recipe made with fragrant lemongrass and funky shrimp paste from Java called telur petis.
If you know and love Indonesian food but haven’t heard of Minang food or Padang food, you may be surprised to know that some of Indonesia’s best-known dishes are from Western Sumatra’s capital Padang, including one of the world’s most-loved dishes, rendang.
Indonesians know and love the food of Padang, which is something of a culinary destination for Indonesian food lovers – thanks to the Minangkabau people, who have taken their cuisine with them when they’ve migrated to other parts of Indonesia, as well as neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore, and opened restaurants.
I wish we had a restaurant offering Padang food here in Siem Reap, because there are many similarities to Cambodian food, as lovers of Cambodian cuisine and regular readers of Grantourismo will appreciate. Just look at the ingredients of the spice paste for this Padang style eggs recipe: galangal, turmeric, ginger, chillies, shallots, and garlic.
Add any combination of lemongrass, kaffir lime, finger root (Chinese keys), or coriander and you can create one of the canonical spice pastes or kroeungs of Cambodian cuisine. More on that in another post! For now, just a few tips to making this Padang style eggs recipe for gulai telur Pedang.
Tips for Making this Padang Style Eggs Recipe for Gulai Telur Pedang
I only have a few quick tips to making this Padang style eggs recipe for gulai telur Pedang, as it’s really very straightforward. Indonesians favour hard boiled eggs but we prefer our soft-boiled eggs and we think they work well in this dish and don’t impact the integrity of the dish or affect the flavour.
Cook your boiled eggs as you wish. Terence has great advice in his excellent guide to cooking boiled eggs perfectly.
Do use a mortar and pestle to make the spice paste. It really doesn’t taste the same made in a blender. It’s so easy to pound a paste in a mortar and pestle, it’s great for your arms, and it tastes infinitely better.
You could make your own crunchy fried shallots but we buy our’s from the market as they taste so good. You can also buy crispy fried shallots online.
We actually like to give this Padang style eggs recipe a bit more of a kick of chilli, although that’s not traditional (though nor is soft boiled eggs!) which is why we recommend serving it with dishes of birds-eye chillies or chilli flakes on the side.
Padang Style Eggs Recipe for Gulai Telur Pedang
Ingredients
- 8 eggs boiled to your liking
- 1 knob fresh galangal 2 cm length, peeled and sliced
- 1 knob fresh ginger 2 cm length, peeled and sliced
- 1 piece of fresh turmeric 2 cm length, peeled and sliced, or 1 tsp ground turmeric
- 4 shallots finely chopped
- 3 garlic cloves crushed and finely chopped
- 2 bird’s eye chillies
- 400 ml coconut milk
- 1 turmeric leaf finely chopped (optional)
- 1 tbsp tamarind juice
- ½ tsp salt
- ½ tsp sugar optional
- 2 tbsp crispy fried shallots
To Serve
- 2 tbsp fried shallots
- 2 pieces bird’s eye chillies or chilli flakes
Instructions
- Boil the eggs to your liking following our guide, then when cool, peel them.
- In mortar and pestle, pound the fresh galangal, ginger, turmeric, shallots, garlic, and chillies into a coarse paste.
- In a wok, heat the coconut milk on low heat until it comes to a boil, then add the spice paste and shredded turmeric leaf, and combine well.
- Add the boiled eggs and simmer for five minutes.
- Add the tamarind juice and salt, stir, then taste, and adjust the seasoning if necessary (adding more salt if needed or if too spicy or salty for your taste, you add a little sugar), then continue to simmer for two minutes.
- Transfer to a serving bowl and garnish with the crunchy fried shallots, and serve with additional fried shallots and bird’s eye chillies or chilli flakes on the side.
Nutrition
Please do let us know if make this Padang style eggs recipe for gulai telur Pedang in the comments below as we’d love to know how the dish turned out for you.
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