Sha Cha Jiang Image Used Under Creative Commons License From ytower.com.tw
Citizens, despite its name, Sha Cha Jiang is nothing like a Western BBQ sauce: it’s actually an Umami bomb utilizing a range of dried seafood, chili, garlic, nuts and spices that adds an incredibly deep flavor to stir-fries throughout China and Taiwan.
Some present the theory that it was brought to China from Malaysia by the Chinese traders who lived there, and it does indeed have many classic hallmarks and ingredients of a good satay sauce from that region!
Robert Matthews on feedmethat.com has this to say about the etymology and usage of the sauce:
Sha Cha Jiang and Satay are one and the same thing. “Satay” is the Southern Min (Xiamen, Chaozhou and Taiwan dialect all belong to the Southern Min group of Chinese dialects) pronunciation of Mandarin “Sha Cha”, Jiang just means sauce.
Cha means tea in Mandarin; the English word TEA is in fact an anglicization of the Southern Min word TE – it sounds perfect if you say it in Spanish. Many Chinese people have no idea of how to romanize systematically: Sha Zha Chiang is a hodgepodge spelling which should be ignored.
Satay sauce is often used in Southeast Chinese cooking and in Southeast Asia, where there are many immigrants from SE China. One tasty way to use it is as a dip for Huoguo (“firepot”), where guests sit around a sort of samovar and dip vegetables, meat and fish into the boiling water to cook. After removing the cooked food, it is often dipped into a bowl containing satay sauce and perhaps an egg. At the end of the meal, everybody gets to share the delicious broth.
I found an excellent recipe online for this sauce and have modified it to suit my personal tastes – try stir-frying some green beans with this fantastic condiment. It has endless culinary applications and keeps a very long time in the fridge. I also specify quail eggs instead of chicken eggs as they do not carry salmonella.
3 dried scallops (conpoy), soaked until soft, water discarded
2 dried oysters, soaked until soft, water discarded
2 tsp lemon peel, zested with a microplane
1 cup peanuts, no red papery skins on them
3 large raw shrimp heads (w/shells is ok)
3 tsp garlic
4 tsp dobanjan (Sichuan chilli-bean sauce)
2 tbsp sesame oil
1 ½ tbsp curry powder
½ tbsp rice vinegar
½ tbsp shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
1 tbsp soy sauce (ideally Shanghai soy sauce with dried shrimp roe in it)
Other ingredients:
1 medium onion
7 Tbsp Peanut Oil
Soy sauce to taste
Lemon juice to taste
Shaoxing to taste
Rice vinegar to taste
For garnish
3 raw quail eggs (optional) (note that quail eggs do not carry the salmonella bacteria and are perfectly safe to eat raw – original recipe called for 1 raw chicken egg.
Instructions
Grind the spices together in a spice grinder until a fine powder is formed. Add the next level of dryness/dampness to a food processor and grind these with the dry spice powder to form a paste. Mix the paste with the wet ingredients to create a homogeneous mixture.
In a frying pan, sauté 1 medium onion, very finely minced, in peanut oil.
Add the ground paste and sauté/simmer at low heat until it becomes like a powder.
Mix in additional soy, shaoxing, vinegar and lemon juice to taste – it will not require much of any of these to achieve your equivalent of palatal perfection.
Serve with 3 raw quail eggs added to the sauce just before using and mix well. (*raw egg can be omitted)
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