Assam Sambal Seafood Curry 亚参三巴海鲜咖哩

Wanna a bowl of Nyonya curry to spice you up?

As promised, here is the recipe that will spice you up using the Sambal Belacan Chili paste prepared in my previous post.

The following version of seafood curry is more like the Nyonya style where Assam was used instead of coconut milk. Assam in English means tamarind. With tamarind as one of the ingredients, you can expect this is a sour and spicy curry. J

Once you have this ready homemade sambal chili paste stocked up in your pantry, whenever you yearn for curry, you can have it in less than 30 minutes and without the concern of unhealthy preservative in the food.

This round of seafood curry, we used squids and prawns.  Basically you can use any seafood to your liking. For fish you can check out my previous curry recipe Assam Stingray which also used the same homemade chili paste.

Let’s cook healthily and eat healthily!

Sambal Belacan Chili paste三巴峇拉煎辣椒酱

Sambal is one of the most popular spicy condiments used in Southeast-Asian-influenced cuisine. Belacan is a Malay word.  It means dried shrimp paste. Sambal Belacan is dried shrimp chili paste. For Malaysian, Indonesian and Singaporean spicy food lover, sambal is one of the common spices easily found in their pantry. Due to the modern lifestyle many people opt to buy pre-packed readymade spices.  However considering the side effects of food preservatives, why not spend a little effort to make our own healthy Sambal Belacan paste?

Sambal Belacan Chili  Paste - Featured in Group Recipes 28th January 2012

The following is a recipe from Auntie Lan.  Again I’m only sharing the main ingredients.  Apologies for not giving detailed measurement as I didn’t manage to weigh the ingredients before she started to grind the paste. You can roughly adjust to your own liking. The following photo showed the measurement of half portion of the ingredients.  To get fine texture, we grind the ingredients in two batches.
We used blender to grind the chili ingredients. It may be too much of asking to follow the traditional custom using stone mortar to pound the chili into paste. However, sambal made using stone mortar is supposed to taste much better.  

If you wish to know how to use this chili paste, stay tune for my next post, coming soon! J

Happy 2012 Chinese New Year 龙年行大运

Wishing You and Your Family A Happy, Healthy & Prosperous Dragon Year!

开心迎春庆团圆

心想事成万事利

乐业安居步步升

龙马精神朝气旺

龙运财运齐亨通