BBQ chicken wings & peanut sauce, inspired by satay
Dutch peanut butter is amazing. I don’t know what they do to the peanuts or how they make it, but it is so rich, creamy, and delicious. I used to get natural peanut butter when I was living in Australia too, but it didn’t always taste great on its own. And by the time we got to the bottom of the jar, we often found ourselves with a dry paste that required some muscle to scrape out. I was skeptical when people on social media told me to try peanut butter in the Netherlands, but now I’m a convert.
When I posted a photo of my peanut butter-slathered toast on social media recently, two people living in the Netherlands told me that I should try peanut butter with sambal… which brought to mind satay. For non-Singaporean readers, satay refers to barbecued meat skewers served with a robust peanut sauce that has spice paste (or rempah) as its base. Sambal, which is basically caramelised and seasoned spice paste, seemed like the perfect shortcut.
Apart from making the satay sauce, the most labour-intensive part of making satay is threading the small pieces of meat through the bamboo skewers. Because it’s just the two of us at home, I didn’t want to fuss about too much in the kitchen and used chicken midwings instead. The marinade begins with grinding some garlic with salt and sugar with a pestle and mortar; the salt and sugar acts as an abrasive and breaks the garlic down super quickly.
Then I add fish sauce, chilli powder, turmeric powder, and coriander powder. This mixture gets tossed through the chicken, before it marinates overnight in the refrigerator.
Ketupat, compressed rice cake wrapped in a woven lattice of coconut leaves, is a traditional satay accompaniment. While I don’t have access to coconut leaves here, it’s not difficult to make rice cakes. I cooked rice as per normal, then transferred it into a rectangular container while it was hot (I’m using one of these rectangular storage compartments), and pressed down firmly on the rice with a small, moistened wooden board to compress it. This goes into the fridge overnight as well.
The next day, we grilled the wings over charcoal in our teeny, super basic BBQ setup:
While that was happening, I put together a quick 3-ingredient satay sauce. Here’s some chunky peanut butter and shopbought sambal (you want something that is dark red like this - don’t use curry paste!). Look at how creamy that peanut butter is:
I have to clarify again that this is not traditional satay sauce - for that, you’ll have to make rempah from scratch, caramelise it, and simmer it for a long while with spices. While I am willing to put in the time and elbow grease when nothing but the real deal will do or when I have friends over, for daily meals, I’m more than happy to put something together quickly and for it to be a close-enough approximate.
Sometimes, satay sauce in Singapore comes with a little dollop of fresh pineapple puree (see the very first picture in this newsletter). I love the fresh tropical flavour it provides, so to mimic that, I thinned the mixture down with fresh pineapple juice:
It’s such a great, small-scale barbecue feast. Just bring out the peanut sauce and it becomes a dipping sauce for everything - grilled vegetables, chicken wings, and the usual satay accompaniments. These are fresh slices of cucumber, pieces of red onion (traditionally shallots), and the compressed rice that I’d prepared the day before and sliced into cubes. There’s just something about the combination of jasmine rice, that chicken marinade, smoke, and peanut sauce that makes satay so quintessentially summer to me. So delicious with minimal effort.
You could of course roast the chicken in the oven instead of grilling it over charcoal, but while still good, it will not taste the same without the kiss of smoke.
Just to show you how versatile the sauce is, we made more and had it as a dressing for an assortment of vegetables and tempeh for last night’s dinner, gado gado-style:
Honestly, a good jar of peanut butter lends itself to so many culinary possibilities. I use it just like tahini at home when I make dressings and even made satay beehoon the other day. Maybe a kare-kare next! 👅
Chicken wings and peanut sauce, inspired by satay
Serves 2