Ayam Geprek (Smashed Fried Chicken in Sambal)

Name: Ayam Geprek (Smashed Fried Chicken in Sambal)
Total time: 45 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Indonesian
Ingredients: 800 g Chicken thighs or drumsticks; 200 g Plain flour; 60 g Cornstarch; 250 ml Ice-cold water; 1 tsp each Garlic powder, ground coriander, white pepper, salt; 1 L Oil for frying; 20 Bird's eye chilies; 20 g Garlic, raw; 30 g Shallot, raw; 1 tsp Salt for the sambal; 3 tbsp Hot oil from the fryer; Lime, steamed rice, cucumber and basil leaves

Crisp battered fried chicken smashed straight into a mortar of raw chili sambal, so the shards soak up heat while they are still crackling.

Fuente

Receta de Indonesian warung cooks · 🏠 Cocina casera · Cooks at Indonesia's small street-side warung eateries

Modern Indonesian street dish · Yogyakarta — Not an old traditional dish: the cited article dates ayam geprek to 2003 in Yogyakarta and credits its creation to a cook known as Bu Rum (Ruminah), whose customers asked her to crush her battered fried chicken into sambal. We could not confirm that attribution in any independent source we checked, so it is reported here as the cited article's account rather than as settled fact, and no author is claimed for this recipe. The steps are our own writing.

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Pasos

Season the chicken with salt and a little white pepper and leave it for 15 minutes.
Mix the flour, cornstarch and all the dry seasonings. Take out 250 g of the mix and whisk it with the ice water into a thin batter.
Dip each piece of chicken in the wet batter, then press it hard into the remaining dry flour, squeezing the flour onto the surface with your fingers.
💡 Squeeze rather than dust. The clumps and ragged flakes you create by hand are what turn into the crunchy shards later — a smooth coating gives you a smooth, dull crust.
Heat the oil to 170°C and fry the chicken in batches for 8–10 minutes until deep golden and firm. Drain on a rack, not on paper.
While it fries, pound the chilies, garlic, shallot and salt in a mortar into a rough, wet sambal. Leave it coarse — you want visible flecks of chili.
💡 Do not blend this in a machine if you can help it. A blender whips air into the sambal and makes it foamy and pale; a mortar bruises the chilies and keeps them looking like chilies.
Spoon 3 tablespoons of the hot frying oil straight over the pounded sambal and stir. It will hiss and smell suddenly sweeter.
Put a hot piece of chicken into the mortar and smash it once or twice with the pestle, turning it through the sambal so the broken crust drinks it up.
💡 Smash, do not pulverise. Two hits crack the crust into pieces that hold sambal; five turn the whole thing into wet paste. Do it one piece at a time, straight from the fryer.
Serve immediately over hot rice with cucumber, basil leaves and lime, and any sambal left in the mortar spooned over the top.

💡 Consejos

This dish only works hot and immediate. Chicken smashed into sambal and left for ten minutes is a soggy chicken.
The heat is adjustable and nobody will judge you. Eight chilies is a pleasant burn, twenty is the street version, thirty is a challenge.
Rice, cucumber and cold water are the antidote. Not a fizzy drink — carbonation makes chili heat worse.