Balinese Seafood Sambal

(sambal mata)

I know everyone that comes to Bali and gets to taste some Balinese food also gets to experience some traditional Balinese spice or “sambal” More than likely your first taste is going to burn a little and bring out some sweat on your forehead. But I bet you still couldn’t stop adding a little more and a little more, right ?

Well here’s the recipe for putting together your own Balinese sambal that goes hand in hand with any fish dish, and the ingredients should not be to hard to find no matter where you live in the World.

Photo No.1 shows you the ingredients which are; red small French onions, small red chilly’s, whole lemon grass, some table salt, a lime / lemon, some virgin olive oil and some prawn stock / cube

basically you need to finely chop all your onions, chilly’s and lemon grass. I’ll let you use your own imagination and taste for your chilly to onion ratio’s. Try and de seed your chilly’s before you start dicing. We usually make a full desert bowl when we BBQ sea food here at my place and the Chilly ratio is usually higher than the red onion, we like our’s firey. Normally for that amount of sambal you’ll add 3 sticks of lemon grass and around a half inch cube of prawn stock. The prawn stock mixes through best if you can heat it up. Just stick a fork in it and warm it up over the stove or BBQ.

Just cut your lime in half and squeeze out the juice and the two halves into your bowl of sambal, and mix in your oil, around a quarter of a tea cup per desert bowl of ingredients, add salt to taste.

This is the basic recipe for traditional balinese style sambal (for fish) I hope you try it out and like any recipe it’s just a guide for you to start with.

Feel free to let me know how it goes with your next feed of fish

There are also a couple of other different types of traditional sambals and I’ll start getting the next recipe ready for you to try.

Enjoy

Slim