Another vegetarian/vegan recipe from Indonesia "Bakwan Jagung"

Hello dear Steemians... how are you?


Today it's time for another vegetarian/vegan recipe from Indonesia.
The dish is called "Bakwan Jagung", it's kind of pancake with young sweet corn as the main ingredient.
There is also another variant of this recipe, called "Bakwan Sayur", because the main ingredients are crispy veggies. This snack would have many different names in different province of Indonesia, but they are basically just the same.
Probably you would only see different kind of veggies as main ingredients, but the spices used for this dish are roughly the same.
In West Java it's called "bala-bala", in Surabaya (capital of East Java) it's called "ote-ote", in Malang it's called "weci", in Semarang (capital of Central Java) and it's surrounding this snack is called "piya-piya", in Makasar (South Sulawesi) it's called "bikang doang", and I don't know anymore the other names.. Indonesia has hundreds of regional languages. :-D
This snack can be easily found in many street vendors in my home country and isn't pricey at all.
However you would tend to get the non vegetarian ones if you buy it in restaurants, because they sometimes add some shrimp and eggs too. I doubt that the street vendors would use them, since it makes the production cost higher and the prices of snacks sold by street vendors are normally rather low.
But if you're vegetarian/vegan by ideology or if you're allergic to shrimp, I suggest you to ask the seller clearly whether it's really fit for vegan/vegetarian or not.
Note for travellers:
Indonesia has plenty varieties of vegetarian dishes, but it's generally not because our folks are vegetarian by ideology but more because vegetarian dishes are cheaper than meat & co.
So, the common folks are normally not so attentive nor knowledgeable about vegetarian or vegan lifestyle and their prohibition.
Often they only remember that they don't use fish nor meat for the dish then they would conclude that their food are safe for vegetarian/vegan or people with allergic for example... unfortunately many people tend to forget telling you if they had used shrimp paste or fish sauce if you don't ask thoroughly.
So if you think it's really important that the food is safe from any animal essence, then you HAVE TO ask thoroughly and emphasize your concern well. ^_^
Most of sellers don't really mean to cheat, they are simply not attentive enough and often just don't know about the issue well enough.

Ok, let's just see our recipe!

Ingredients:

• 3 pcs of sweet corn (or a can of preserved sweet corn ca. 300 gram)
• 2 tbsp chopped celery
• 2 stalks of spring onion, chopped
• 1 pc carrot, shredded
  ** I personally prefer to combine "bakwan jagung" with "bakwan sayur" so that I could get carbo and veggies in one dish. So I use another hand full of green peas and soybean sprout. You can also add some shredded white cabbage.
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 onion or 2 shallots
• 1 tbsp coriander seeds or 1 tsp ground coriander. I prefer the seeds cos they taste stronger
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 4 tbsp all purpose flour
• 3 tbsp rice flour
• 3 tbsp tapioca flour (If you don't have tapioca flour at home, you could just replace it with another 2 tbsp all purpose flour and 1 tbsp rice flour)
• 1 tsp baking powder (optional)

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Chopped celery and spring onions

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Green peas, soybean sprout & julienned carrot

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Instruction:
1. Grind well the garlic, coriander seeds, onion, salt and sugar.

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2. Grate the sweet corn then grind it using mortar roughly. You don't need to grind it thoroughly, we should still recognise it's shape. So if you use food processor, then please use the smaller power for few second.

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3. Mix the ground spices, corn and the veggies in a big bowl. Add the flour and pour in water slowly while stirring it. Don't stir too long/too often to avoid getting too much gluten in the pancake paste. Don't use too much water either. Just make sure that the paste is viscous enough so that the veggies could stick together if we fry it in a sphere shape. The amount of water is about 50-100 ml, depends on how much additional veggies or what kind of veggies you use.

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4. We can now deep fry the "bakwan". If you like to have a nice golden colour, add a bit of ground turmeric in the paste. And if you wish to have uniformly round shape for your "bakwan", you can use a round ladle made of stainless steel, medium size . Dip the ladle in the hot cooking oil first before you scoop the paste. After scooping the paste just dip the ladle in the frying pan filled with hot cooking oil. When it's nearly well fried, the paste could loosen up from the ladle just with a little push using a chopstick or spoon. The bakwan is well fried when it get a pretty golden/brownish colour.

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We are Indonesian love to eat it with rawit chilis but if you don't enjoy eating spicy food, then just serve it without chilis.
Have a nice try my friends! :)