Bebek Madura｜East Java
Part 18/38 in a series exploring one dish from each province of Indonesia.
After a decade of visiting and living in Indonesia I really don’t know how I managed to have never tasted this until now. You can find it all over the place and it’s well-known as being tasty, so I have no idea what happened there, but it’s really good. Always great to find a new delicious food, and this was so unexpectedly tasty that it was like trying rendang for the first time all over again. And it sounded easy enough to make too - the idea here really is to cook the meat in all the blended spices, then deep fry the two separately.
Adapted from here.
☑ TESTED
Ingredients
Main stuff
- 1 duck
- 1 lime
- 350 ml water
- 2 tbsp tamarind water
- Salt and sugar to taste
- Oil (enough to come up about halfway on the duck leg when you lay it in the pan, for example)
Spices to blend
- 25 Indonesian onions (10 shallots)
- 10 cloves of garlic
- 25 red bird’s eye chillies
- 15 red cayenne chillies
- 3 candlenuts
- 2 lemongrass
- 2 segments of ginger
- 2 segments of galangal
- 1 segment of turmeric
- 10 kaffir lime leaves (remove the central stem)
- 1 tsp coriander powder / 2 tsp coriander seeds
- ½ tsp ground white pepper / ¾ tsp white peppercorns
Prep
Squeeze the lime over the duck meat, leave for 20 minutes.
(Lightly dry fry the coriander and white pepper until aromatic if using the whole seeds)
Blend up the blended bits.
Cooking
Saute blended bits until fragrant (~2 minutes).
Add duck, mix, seal the meat.
Add water, tamarind water, salt, sugar.
Cover and cook on low for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until meat soft and water reduced.
Remove the meat and deep fry separately until golden brown (oil so that it reaches halfway up the side of the meat, then ~5 minutes on each side)
Add the cooking oil back into the spices in the pan, cook on low for 20–30 minutes stirring continuously until dark brown, almost black. Add a little water to help prevent burning.