No recipe for nasi goreng is going to be exact. It is made in many ways and with varied ingredients, yet still carries the name. And all nasi goreng means is “fried rice”. But there’s more to it than that.

Nasi goreng is Indonesian at its core but is also eaten in Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and in other regions where there are Indonesian immigrant communities, including the Netherlands with its old colonial ties to Indonesia. And once upon a time it was eaten all over the world, when its fame spread to every continent and it became a staple item on very many restaurant menus.

In the Nineties, when the restaurant world changed seismically as entire regional food cultures swamped almost every major city in the world, dishes such as nasi goreng became subsumed by a proliferation of a million “foreign” dishes many of us had never heard of let alone tasted. Thai food was suddenly everywhere, with Vietnamese cuisine in its wake. Sushi slowly but inexorably became as ubiquitous as margherita pizza and fish and chips.

But nasi goreng remains one of greater Asia’s finest dishes, despite its simplicity, because of its magical core element: caramelisation. It’s the way the rice becomes caramelised that gives it its standout quality in a realm where there are many other fried rice dishes with neither its fame nor its arresting appeal.

My colleague and friend Brooks Spector once lived in Indonesia so he knows much more about it than I do. He tells me that the version of nasi goreng I made is called nasi goreng istimewa (fried rice special) because of the fried egg on top. And it is never, ever, eaten with chopsticks, so I erred in using a pair of them to add colour to the photo above. We had not used those to eat it with, as it happens (hardly apt for a fried egg). But please accept my apologies for not being able to cook the dish all over again to take a new picture without chopsticks in it. 🤦  (Read Brooks’ delightfully anecdotal piece on Diplomatic Dining in this weekend’s edition of Thank God It’s Food, to be published on Friday afternoon.)

As for that fried egg, there is an alternative of making, first, a slimline omelette, one that is spread really thinly over the pan, then removing it and, once cooled, rolling it up and cutting it into thin strips. These little rolls of omelette are then stirred into the rice dish just before serving, with perhaps a few strips of omelette on top.

Nasi goreng gets its caramelised character from a mixture of dark soy sauce, sweet soy sauce (kecap manis), and a few other interchangeable ingredients such as lime juice, fish sauce, and sambal oelek, the Indonesian paste made with chillies, salt, vinegar and sometimes minced onion/shallot and/or garlic. 

But the very core ingredient of it, other than the rice itself, is shrimp paste, particularly terasi, an ancient Javanese shrimp paste used in a number of Asian cuisines. You do need to get hold of some to do a proper nasi goreng, and I in fact put off making my nasi goreng for several weeks while my local friendly superstore contacts ordered some in for me. It’s worth developing a relationship with your store manager, especially in a small town such as mine. If they don’t have what you’re looking for, there’s no reason why they can’t get it. Just ask them and abide yourself in patience until it arrives. The result, here in Cradock, is that over the past few years the store’s stock range has increased very pleasingly.

The rice in nasi goreng has already been cooked. In Indonesia it is popular for breakfast, using leftover rice from the previous night’s supper. If making it with rice you’ve cooked especially for nasi goreng, make it earlier in the day, drain it, and pour it out onto an oven tray. Then use a fork to fluff it out, so to speak, i.e. to avoid clumping, Then just leave it aside until you need it later.

You can add a few garnishes too other than a fried egg or omelette, such as crispy fried shallots (or onions), slices of cucumber and wedges of tomato, carrot achar, extra chilli sauce, and prawn crackers. Talking of which, I must ask my store contact to get in some shallots. You can buy prawn crackers from the Asian speciality shelf of your supermarket or an Asian speciality food store. Just fry them in a little hot oil while holding the centre of the hard cracker down with a wooden spoon. It will puff up very quickly and sort of unfurl. They’re fun to make.

Finally, there are other ingredients you can include, from vegetables to chicken to shrimps/prawns. My recipe, as below, uses blanched shrimps which I bought frozen. Just drain them very well for a fair amount of time as you don’t want soggy shrimps going into your nasi goreng and ruining it.

So, given that nasi goreng can vary a great deal of garnishes and optional extras, stick to the important core of it when making it, and that’s its central essence of that “caramelised” character that comes, not from caramelisation as such but from the flavour of the sauce mix that flavours the rice, and the beautiful butterscotch colour it gives it.

I garnished mine with prawn crackers, a fried egg, and cucumber and tomato.

(Serves 2 or 3)

Ingredients

240 g blanched shrimps

2 cups jasmine rice, cooked and drained

40 ml kecap manis/sweet soy sauce

15 ml soy sauce

1 Tbsp fish sauce

1 Tbsp lime juice

1 tsp sambal oelek

1 medium onion or 2 or 3 shallots

3 Tbsp peanut oil plus 3 or 4 Tbsp more for the prawn crackers

4 spring onions, sliced on the diagonal

3 garlic cloves, minced

3 cm fresh ginger, peeled and grated or minced

I red or green chilli, sliced thinly

12 green beans, blanched and chopped on the diagonal

3 small Chinese cabbage leaves, shredded

1 heaped tsp shrimp paste/terasi

Prawn crackers, fried in hot peanut oil until puffed up, and drained

2 eggs, fried (3 if serving 3)

Method

Cook the rice, drain it, and lay it out on an oven tray, then fluff it with a fork so that it doesn’t form clumps. Leave it for later.

Combine the sweet soy sauce (or the condiment known as kecap manis), dark or regular soy sauce, fish sauce and sambal oelek in a bowl. Set aside.

Heat 2 Tbsp peanut oil in a wok and stir-fry the sliced onion (or preferably shallots if you don’t live in Cradock). Add the green beans and garlic and stir-fry for a minute. Add the ginger, finely sliced, and fry for a minute. Stir in the shrimp paste.

Add the shrimps and stir-fry for two minutes. Add the rice, spring onions, cabbage, chillies and the soy sauce mixture you combined earlier.

Stir-fry for 3 minutes or so. If completing it my way, fry an egg to put atop each serving, slice cucumber and tomato to serve on the side, and finish off with a few prawn crackers. You can of course vary your recipe, just as everyone in Indonesia does. DM/TGIFood 

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