Indonesian Deviled Eggs

This hybrid of Indonesian telor balado and Deep South church picnic deviled eggs will rock your cocktail party. The egg yolk filling is seasoned with Indonesian sambal, Squid brand fish sauce, chopped green onions, anchovy paste and Thai chiles. You can make them hot, very hot, or ridiculously hot.

Indonesian sambal is a complex hot sauce that combines a base of shallots, garlic and ginger with tamarind and your choice of other flavorings, all ground together in a mortar and pestle with a lot of red hot chile peppers. I added a little tomato to my sambal to smooth it out. And I used a Vitamix instead of the mortar and pestle because I am lazy.

The sambal recipe is for my new project, The Hot Sauce Cookbook from Ten Speed Press (May 2013). Once I had the sambal ready, I used it to make Sambal Eggplant and Telor Balado, an Indonesian dish of fried hard-boiled eggs topped with Indonesian hot sauce.

This morning I was working on a deviled egg recipe for the Louisiana pepper sauce chapter of the book. I started with the very old church picnic recipe in James Beard’s American Cookery that combines mayo, mustard, grated onion and Tabasco sauce. Beard listed a bunch of variations, including a “Mexican” version with cumin and sour cream and another with chopped green chile. Then I remembered the deviled eggs I ate at Grove restaurant in Discovery Green, made with mayo, anchovy and fish sauce.

The connection between American deviled eggs and Indonesian telor balado is so obvious, I am sure somebody must have come up a hybrid like this before. But tell me about it later, right now I am enjoying my breakfast.

(Recipe after the jump)

Sambal Telor Deviled Eggs

Sambal Oelek is a pure pepper paste that won’t taste very good in this recipe. Look for an Indonesian sambal with shallots and garlic, or make one yourself at home.

6 peeled hard-boiled eggs
3-5 red Thai chiles (to taste)
2 tablespoons minced green onion
1 tablespoon mayo or to taste
2 tablespoons Indonesian Sambal
1 teaspoon fish sauce such as Squid brand
1 teaspoon anchovy paste

Cut the eggs in half neatly (horizontally, diagonally or vertically as you desire) and scoop the yolks into a mixing bowl. Put the egg white halves aside. Cut one chile into tiny rings for the garnish and mince the rest. Add the minced chiles, green onion, mayo, sambal, fish sauce and anchovy paste to the yolks and mash thoroughly with a fork, mixing well. Pipe the yolk mixture from a pastry bag into the egg white halves. (You can make a pastry bag from a plastic sandwich bag with a corner cut off.) Or spoon the mixture into the whites and smooth it out. Garnish each egg half with a ring or two of red chile. Arrange on a plate and serve immediately.