Nasi lemak
Malaysia’s national dish: rice cooked in coconut milk with pandan leaf, with spicy sambal, fried anchovies, peanuts, cucumber and egg. It’s eaten for breakfast wrapped in a banana leaf.
Ingredients
- 300 g jasmine rice
- 400 ml coconut milk
- 1 pandan leaf (optional) and 1 piece of ginger
- Sambal: 10 soaked dried chillies, 4 shallots, 3 garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon of shrimp paste, 2 tablespoons of tamarind, sugar and salt
- 50 g small dried anchovies (ikan bilis)
- 50 g peanuts
- 4 eggs
- 1 cucumber
- Oil
How to make it at home
- Rinse the rice and cook it with the coconut milk, a little water, the knotted pandan, the ginger and salt.
- Blend the chillies, shallots, garlic and shrimp paste, and fry the paste over a low heat for 15 minutes; add the tamarind, sugar and salt.
- Fry the anchovies and peanuts separately until crisp.
- Hard-boil or fry the eggs and slice the cucumber.
- Serve the rice with the sambal, anchovies, peanuts, egg and cucumber around it.
The trick: Stir some of the fried anchovies into the sambal: that’s how the stalls do it.