#tempeh

#tempeh

Tempeh is a gift to all home cooks from Indonesia. Made from fermented compressed soy beans, it's an intelligent ingredient equivalent to meat in terms of protein, subtle and nutty in flavour and chewy in texture. Happily, it is also now widely available in most large UK supermarkets. Here, the tempeh is cooked in a typical Indonesian way that is, fried until crisp, then coated in a sticky, spicy sweet soy sauce and liberally sprinkled with salted peanuts.

It starts with seasoned sushi rice (which I could eat just by itself) and is topped with a variety of fun things to munch on such as salt- and lime-seasoned cabbage, edamame beans and glazed pieces of barbecued tempeh, all bound together with a gentle but perky sriracha sauce. Like many of us today, it borrows ideas from all over the world and is, I think, all the more delicious for it.