Toss goat with 1 teaspoon of the salt in a medium bowl.
Sprinkle with the chopped tarragon or chives, decorate with the chive flowers, if desired, and serve..Originally appeared: June 2013."Sambal," chef William Wongso told me when I arrived in Jakarta in the summer of 2016, "is a state of mind.".
At first, I thought I knew precisely what Wongso, the 73-year-old chef and Indonesian TV personality who happens to be the island nation's chief culinary diplomat, meant—because sambal was my state of mind..I'd flown there on a hunch: that the sambal oelek I'd been eating for years—the delectable chile paste from Huy Fong Foods, maker of sriracha—was not the be-all and end-all of sambal.The term sambal, I knew, referred to the spicy condiments found across Indonesia (and Malaysia and Singapore), and because Indonesia is made up of 17,508 islands with individual culinary traditions, I hoped to encounter and begin to understand an untold diversity of fiery riches.
Over the course of two weeks, I'd bounce from the capital, Jakarta, on the island of Java, to paradisiacal Bali, to the tip of Sulawesi, to the hills and forests of North Sumatra, tasting every sambal I could dip a spoon into.Along the way, perhaps I would start to understand what sambal meant to the 271 million people in this enormous, mostly Muslim nation..
I started to get a sense on a stroll through a quiet corner of otherwise frenetic Jakarta, when I glanced inside a tiny storefront and saw sambal being, well, "oeleked"—that is, pounded.
In a foot-wide granite mortar called a cobek, an older woman had mostly red chiles, some green ones, shallots, and garlic, which she was mashing nonchalantly with a yard-long wooden pestle called an ulekan., Yao interprets the flavors he grew up with as the son of Taiwanese immigrants in the San Gabriel Valley—booming and fading the levels of burnt shallot, sweet soy, basil, and Chinese celery.Three-cup chicken may be the "Free Bird" of Taiwanese cuisine; if you only know one thing about the island's food culture, this dish—seasoned with equal parts soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice wine—is probably it.
Yao's three-cup cover takes the form of a paste, rubbed into curls of octopus or painted on buckwheat crackers sandwiching sweet raw scallops.Thick corn soup is a Taiwanese lunch-box staple; Yao also borrows from congees and egg drops for his luxe rendition, which surrounds a brilliant yellow yolk.
These are flossy ideas, evidence of a thoughtful cook.But the dish that cemented Yao as a Best New Chef is also his most modest: Delicate branzino and ribbons of scallion scorched with burning-hot oil, a Taiwanese method that adjusts the scallion's brightness from mellow flicker to floodlight.