In Indonesia, gado gado is everywhere. The nation’s famous vegetable salad can be found at restaurants and in home kitchens, as well as at the bustling food stalls that line city streets, where you can watch the dish materialize at the vendors’ expert hands.
First is the sambal kacang, a sauce made to order. A few handfuls of ingredients—fried peanuts, some garlic cloves and chiles, palm sugar, the pungent shrimp paste called terasi—are tossed into a wide stone vessel and pounded into a marvelously complex mash that is then transformed into a sauce with a few splashes of water. Atop that comes a deluge of vegetables, from cucumbers to green beans to bitter melon, sliced to bite-size with a paring knife. Next, some boiled eggs or perhaps boiled potatoes, leafy greens, fried tempeh or tofu, bean sprouts, or the compressed rice sticks known as lontong—the inclusions in both the salad and the sambal vary from region to region and from cook to cook. In any case, the final step is always the same: an assertive toss (“gado
