Gado-Gado

Gado-gado is an Indonesian salad of raw, lightly boiled, blanched or steamed vegetables such as cabbage, bean sprouts and spinach, combined with hard-boiled egg, boiled potato, fried tofu and tempeh and sliced lontong, a rice cake compressed and cooked in a banana leaf wrapper, all dressed with a peanut sauce and often topped with fried shallots and krupuk crackers. In 2018 the Indonesian government named gado-gado one of five official national dishes of the country, alongside soto, satay, nasi goreng and rendang. Its exact origin is genuinely disputed: one theory derives the name from the Betawi word digado, meaning eaten without rice, explaining why compressed rice cake stands in for plain rice; another traces the dish to the Tugu villages near Jakarta settled by Portuguese arrivals in the early eighteenth century; and a third credits Chinese residents of old Batavia with adapting the Javanese vegetable dish pecel into what became gado-gado. Whichever account is correct, the peanut sauce dressing made from ground fried peanuts, palm sugar, chili, salt, tamarind and lime juice is what defines the dish across its many regional versions today.