Soto Betawi

Preparation: 30 minutes.
Cooking: 30 minutes.


Today we cooked "Soto Betawi", a traditional Jakarta, Indonesian food. We "googled" and got the recipe. We used a few web pages as reference. One is using Indonesian language, and the other is English. Here they are:
Indonesian Language
English

We modified some ingredients, because we couldn't find few herbs.
The ingredients:

• 300 grams boneless chicken breast
  
• coconut milk (thick)200 ml
• lemon grass 1 stick
• lemon leaves 4
  
• water 500 ml
• 2 cm of galangal.
  

Seasoning (crushed together):

• garlic 3 cloves
• shallot 4 big size
• candle nuts 8
• turmeric 2 cm
  
• paper
• salt

Accompanion:

• 5 small potato
  
• 2 tomato ripe, cubes
  
• spring onion, for sprinkle
  
• Lime
• Chili
  

Extra seasoning:

• salt and sugar
• beef stock cube
  

The recipe uses beef, but I've tried the chicken version of this dish, so we decided to use chicken breast instead of beef. We didn't get the bay leaves, so we didn't use it.

Peel the shallots, garlic, and turmeric. We used a traditional Indonesian tool called "cobek" to crush the ingredients, but using blender should be fine.
Put the shallots, garlics, turmeric, candle nuts, salt and pepper together. Crush them until become smooth paste.
Beat the lemon grass and galangal.
Heat the wok and add 4 tablespoons of cooking oil. Stir fry the crushed ingredients for 1 minute, and put the beaten lemon grass and galangal also lime leaves inside, and add the chicken. Mix them well together for 2 minutes. Add water and let it to boil. Add beef stock.
After it boils, add coconut milk inside. Pour it slowly while stir it continuously. And let it boils again.
Taste it, if you like it to be saltier and sweeter, add salt and sugar. The dish is ready.

While waiting the "soto" boils, we can prepare the companion. Cut the potatoes and tomatoes into cubes. Boil the potatoes to make it tender and then deep fry it. Put cube tomatoes to a plate to serve. Chop the spring onion to sprinkle.
To make the chili paste, boil some water in small sauce pan and put chilies inside. Let it boil for 5 minutes. Peel some shallots. This time we used 15 Thai chilies and 2 shallots. Dry the chilies, and crush the chilies together with the shallots. Put it on a small bowl to serve.

To prepare the dish, put some chopped tomatoes and fried potatoes. Pour the "soto" on top of it. Sprinkle the chopped spring onions. If you like sour taste, add some lime juice.
Rice will be a perfect match for this dish.

I'm quite proud with the result today. For me it was very delicious.