Trassi - Balachan or Blachan
Trassi is probably one of the
odder ingredients in many Southeast Asian
dishes.
Trassi is made from
shrimp,
sardines and other small
salted fish. After having been left in the
sun to
ferment until very
pungent and
odorous it is
mashed and in some cases
dried (probably mostly for
export or
transport - where I live
currently I'd probably be hard put to find the stuff in an un-dried form). In Asian
markets it's available as a
paste, a
powder or in
cake form.
Use
Use of trassi in Asian cuisines can probably best be likened to the use of
bouillon in
western cuisines. It adds
flavor to the
dish. It's also quite
salty, so that helps, too.
Indonesian cuisine
I only really know
Indonesian cuisine, so I'll confine my comments to that.
If you're anywhere near serious about cooking Indonesian dishes, trassi is an essential ingredient to have. There are a great number of dishes that will require the use of trassi, for example
nasi goreng, nearly all different kinds of
sambal, a great number of meat dishes, like
saté ayam rendang (saté made of
chicken with
spices), daging bumbu rujak (meat dish with '
rujak' seasoning) and daging bumbu besengèk (you guessed it: meat dish with 'besengèk' seasoning).
In the
recipes for the above dishes trassi is often not listed separately on the ingredients list. Instead, '
sambal trassi' is listed. This combines two very
common ingredients in Indonesian cuisine, trassi and sambal. Sambal trassi is just that, sambal (which is a paste of ground
lomboks -
chili peppers) with trassi.
April 10, 2001