My standards for peanut sauce are high. I'm not talking orange sticky gloop made with peanut butter. The peanut sauce I crave is discrete chunks of roasted peanuts thickening a sauce that drips off the spoon. It's dark brown, rich and sweet and tangy; a little gritty at the bottom of the bowl. I can taste it exactly, over ten years since I last ate it (Tony and Ethel who ran Munchy Munchy in Oxford retired to Seattle and I haven't yet spotted them in Whole Foods) but I don't know what all the flavours in it are. Not as richly sweet as hoi sin, not as biting as soy sauce. I think it may be tamarind. Most of the recipes I've seen have tamarind and chili and palm sugar or brown sugar, ginger and lemon grass, garlic and galangal or sometimes dried shrimp. Some have fish sauce and lime juice and curry paste. The version I'm after doesn't have coconut milk. Time for some grinding and stirring.
Peanut sauce
My standards for peanut sauce are high. I'm not talking orange sticky gloop made with peanut butter. The peanut sauce I crave is discrete chunks of roasted peanuts thickening a sauce that drips off the spoon. It's dark brown, rich and sweet and tangy; a little gritty at the bottom of the bowl. I can taste it exactly, over ten years since I last ate it (Tony and Ethel who ran Munchy Munchy in Oxford retired to Seattle and I haven't yet spotted them in Whole Foods) but I don't know what all the flavours in it are. Not as richly sweet as hoi sin, not as biting as soy sauce. I think it may be tamarind. Most of the recipes I've seen have tamarind and chili and palm sugar or brown sugar, ginger and lemon grass, garlic and galangal or sometimes dried shrimp. Some have fish sauce and lime juice and curry paste. The version I'm after doesn't have coconut milk. Time for some grinding and stirring.
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