Kerabu Limau Bali

the Malay raw salad from the pomelo's own homeland: flesh broken into dry sacs, tossed with toasted coconut, dried shrimp, shallot, and lime, and bound with nothing at all

Origin: Malaysia

From the journey of Pomelo.

Kerabu is the Malay family of raw salads, close kin to the Thai yam and the Vietnamese gỏi, and built on the same four-part structure: something fresh and bulky, something salty and fermented, something hot, and something sour. Limau bali is the pomelo, and this is the dish made where the fruit is native, which gives it a certain claim to being the original of the whole family. The Malay name is a small puzzle. Limau bali means Bali lime, though the fruit is not distinctively Balinese and Citrus maxima grows wild across the whole archipelago. The epithet appears to mark it out as the large one or the foreign one rather than to record where it came from, in the way that many languages attach a distant place-name to whatever is oversized. What separates kerabu from its Thai and Vietnamese relations is kerisik, coconut toasted dark and then pounded until its own oil comes out and it collapses into a coarse, damp, intensely nutty paste. It is not the same thing as toasted desiccated coconut and it cannot be replaced by it: kerisik carries a roasted depth that sits underneath the whole salad, and it thickens the dressing very slightly without any other binder. Dried shrimp, pounded to a floss, does the salty work that fish sauce does elsewhere.

Ingredients

Salad

  • 1 large pomelo, heavy for its size
  • 40 g dried shrimp, soaked 10 minutes and drained
  • 4 whole shallots, sliced paper-thin
  • 2 whole red bird's eye chillies, finely sliced
  • 2 stalks lemongrass, tender inner core only, sliced hair-thin
  • 6 leaves kaffir lime leaves, centre rib removed, shredded hair-thin
  • 1 handful Vietnamese mint (daun kesum) or ordinary mint, torn

Kerisik

  • 100 g freshly grated coconut, or desiccated coconut

Dressing

  • 3 tbsp lime juice, freshly squeezed
  • 1.5 tbsp palm sugar, shaved
  • 1 tsp sea salt, or to taste

Method

  1. Make the kerisik: toast the grated coconut in a dry pan over a low to medium heat, stirring without stopping, for 10 to 15 minutes until it is a deep chestnut brown and smells strongly roasted. Pound it in a mortar until it turns oily and clumps together.
  2. Toast the drained dried shrimp in the same pan for three minutes until fragrant and slightly crisp, then pound them to a coarse floss.
  3. Quarter the pomelo rind from top to bottom and pull the thick pith away in sheets. Peel the membrane from each segment and break the flesh into loose clusters of juice sacs.
  4. Slice the lemongrass and lime leaves as finely as you possibly can, almost to threads.
  5. Dissolve the palm sugar and salt in the lime juice, then combine everything in a wide bowl and turn gently with your hands two or three times.
  6. Taste, adjust the salt and lime, and serve immediately.

Notes

Grapefruit will not work: its juice sacs are thin and wet and collapse under the dressing, where the pomelo's stay dry and separate. Kerisik keeps a fortnight in a sealed jar and is worth making in quantity, since it is used throughout Malay cooking, in rendang above all. If dried shrimp are unobtainable, use two teaspoons of fish sauce, though the texture will be different. Common additions are shredded poached chicken, flaked grilled fish, or crisp fried anchovies. Serve as one dish amongst several with rice, in the Malay manner, rather than as a course on its own.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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