Semur Ayam / Indonesian Dark Sauce Chicken Stew

In Indonesia, this dish is well known as semur ayam, Ayam means chicken and semur probably comes from the word stew. Basically, semur is Indonesian meat stew (more explanation about this later) that is cooked in low heat for at least 1 to 2 hours in thick dark gravy (the colour varies from dark brown to black depending on the type and how much sweet soy sauce that you use).

The main ingredient for this dish can be many things, but originally it was beef. Then people started to improvised and used chicken, eggs, tofu, potatoes, tempeh and even fish. Still, our most favourite is chicken stew which is also perfect to be combined with other ingredients such as white tofu and potatoes. The tofu and potatoes would be very soft and turned into dark brown colour after absorbing all the sauce and herbs mixture and my boy loved this so much since he was a little kid as they were soft and easy to chew.

Sweet soy sauce is the most important ingredient in making this dish. It will then be combined with other spices and seasonings as you can see in the list below (which is like most Indonesian food, the list is quite long).

I also posted another semur recipes with different ingredients and you can see the recipe in this post (beef meatballs stuffed with quail eggs) and in this post for no meat stew (egg, egg tofu and potatoes).

Ingredients:

1. 1 medium-size chicken, cut into 8 or smaller parts as to your preference
2. 3 potatoes, each cut into 8
3. 2 white firm tofu, each cut into 4
4. 1 tbsp coriander powder
5. 1 tbsp turmeric powder
6. 1/2 nutmeg, grated
7. 1 tbsp salt
8. 5 tbsp cooking oil
9. 6 garlic
10. 10 shallots (150 gr)
11. 5 candlenuts, stir fry without oil until fragrant
12. 2 thumbs of galangal (lengkuas), cut into thin slices
13. 2 thumbs of ginger, cut into thin slices
14. 5 salam or bay leaves
15. 8 lime leaves
16. 5 cloves (cengkeh)
17. 2 medium-size ripe tomato, puree
18. 1/4 + 1/8 cup sweet soy sauce
19. 1 cup coconut water (or water)
20. 1 tsp pepper, or to taste
21. 1 large yellow onion, cut into strips and pan-fry until half cooked with 2 tbsp of butter
22. 3 tbsp fried shallots

Method:

1. In a medium bowl, marinate the chicken with coriander powder, turmeric powder, grated nutmeg and salt for 1 hour
2. Mash cooking oil, garlic, shallots and candlenuts with a blender or grinder or mortar and pestle until they form a fine paste. Transfer to a wok and add galangal and ginger. Stir fry in medium heat until fragrant and the mixture starts to dry out (may take up to 15 minutes)
3. Add chicken  and cook until chicken turns into white colour
4. Add sweet soy sauce, bring to boil and cook for another 5 minutes in medium heat. In this way, the sauce will caramelise and we give time for the chicken to absorb the caramelised sauce
5. Add coconut water and tomato puree and bring to boil, then turn to low heat and cook until the chicken is half cooked
6. Add tofu and potatoes and cook until potatoes are soft. Add pepper and taste to adjust the seasoning. If you want more sauce, you can add more water (but I didn’t do it since it was watery enough). Mix well and turn off the heat
7. Add fried shallots and fried yellow onion and mix well to combine
8. Serve with steam rice