Vegan, gluten, peanut & soyfree Indonesian satay sauce

Indonesian food is very popular in Holland and my family and I eat it a lot. Especially satay (or saté). Satay is made from small pieces of meat or veggies on a skewer. Satay is served with a creamy, thick and tasteful sauce made from peanuts, called satay sauce. The sauce is made with kecap (Indonesian soy sauce) and sambal (Indonesian hot sauce). I am allergic to peanuts and I don’t eat soy or gluten. So I make my own satay sauce from cashew nuts and coconut aminos.

What is Indonesian satay?

You can make satay with almost any kind of meat, but chicken is the most commonly used. Pieces of chicken are marinated in sweet soy sauce, called kecap. Then, the meat is threaded onto sticks and grilled. Almost every Dutch BBQ will have some form of satay skewers on the menu. For a vegan version, you can use jackfruit, pineapple, or mushrooms.

What is satay sauce?

You usually serve satay skewers with a spicy and umami peanut sauce. You serve this sauce on the side or you immerse the skewers into the sauce. An authentic satay sauce consists of milk (whole milk or coconut milk), peanuts, different kinds of sambal and kecap. Sambal oelek is just very fine, raw red pepper. That is combined with a darker, fried sambal: badjak (red pepper fried with sugar, onions, ginger and other spices) or brandal (extra hot). Kecap is cooked soy sauce with spices and sugar. So it’s thicker and deeper in taste then regular soy sauce. Also its sweeter, a bit caramel like.

Dairy, peanut and soyfree!?

I am the biggest satay sauce fan there is. So I make it a lot. But, I don’t eat white sugar, milk, peanuts or soy… Impossible? That word is not in my dictionary! So I replace peanuts with cashews, milk with oat or coconutmilk and kecap with coconut aminos and coconut blossom sugar. And then I add my own spices and make my own sambal.

Bumbu

The start of most Indonesian dishes is a bumbu. A bumbu is a paste that you get by pounding fresh spices into a mortar. That can be a lot of work, so I often use the small kitchen aid that I bought with my immersion blender. You fry the paste in coconut oil. Frying is essential to get a deep taste and let the ingredients caramelize. When preparing an Indonesian dish, you usually fry the bumbu after roasting the dry spices, and before you add the other (main) ingredients like meat or vegetables and fluids.

Kemiri nuts

Kemiri, or candle nuts, are a typical kind of South-East Asian nuts. They look a bit like large, dark and somewhat ‘old’ macademia or hazelnuts. The taste is quite distinct and nothing like any other nut. They taste like Asia. Raw kemiri nuts are not edible and even poisonous. Therefor, usually they are roasted before use. Even in Holland kemiri nuts can be hard to find though. So if you don’t know what they are or if you don’t have them: just leave them out.

Fat & oils

A bit of coconut oil is needed to fry the bumbu. It’s almost impossible to get the same taste by only cooking the ingredients in the sauce.

Ferment

In this recipe I use coconut aminos and coconut flower sugar to replace kecap manis. Be aware that coconut aminos are fermented. In the MM protocol you try to minimise ferment (level 4). The coconut aminos in my opinion, is essential for the sauce. So leaving that out would compromise the Indonesian flavors to much.

Fish sauce

Usually satay sauce is made with fish sauce or trassi (fermented shrimp paste). But I have become hesitant to use those. I learned that fish sauce contains al lot of heavy metals. And shrimp are usually farmed. If you do use fish sauce, be sure to buy real fish sauce. It’s supposed to consist of just slowly fermented anchovies. But usually, in cheap sauces you buy in the supermarket, the fermentation is accelerated by the use of enzymes or even chemicals. And then the lack of flavour is compensated with additives and sugar. A pure fish sauce doesn’t have any additives. My favorite fish sauce is (or was) Red Boat fish sauce.

Other Indonesian recipes

Fan of Indonesian flavours and following a soyfree and glutenfree diet? Then especially the typical Indonesian sauces can be a problem. But not any more! Take a look at my other Indonesian recipes:

FAQ