Sambal Hairbee V. 3.0

I had posted twice about making dried shrimps sambal, the nyonya dish. You can find the recipe on Food Haven and also another post on Best Recipe. However, each time I do, I usually missed out one or two ingredients. The finished result is still as good so my conclusion is – It doesn’t really matter how you do it, it still turns out great.

For this Version 3.0, I omitted lemon grass and use fresh tumeric instead. Instead of shallots, I only use two large onions.

I blended the onions with tumeric in the blender which makes everything a breeze.

I love tumeric but hates the sticky sap that makes everything yellow for days.

Use only the best dried shrimps. These are local Malaysian products, a lot more expensive than imports. Normally, the local ones are paler in colours and they have less shells. Good dried shrimps should smell plesant without reeking of fishy smell.

When I used blender to grind the herbs and spices, I need to add water. So, to remove the water from the paste, I normally put them in the wok to ‘dry’ first, i.e. to let the water evaporate first before I added oil. As I had mentioned in the two posts, I like to blend part of the dried shrimps and leave part of them whole. This way, you get some very nice mixture of whole shrimps and grounded ones.

Due to the chore of blending and the slow stir frying, I normally make a large portion of the sambal hairbee and store them into individual containers.

For the above, I added belacan, cili boh (chili paste), lots of tamarind juice and sugar to make it really delicious. I used some of them to fry vegetables, add to instant noodles, use as sandwich fillings and fry rice too.

Have a good weekend to all!