The sweet and sour flavour of this dish is considered refreshing and very compatible with fried or grilled dishes, including salted fish, ikan goreng, ayam goreng and lalapan, a kind of vegetable salad usually served raw but can also be cooked, and is usually eaten with steamed rice and sambal terasi chili paste. It is a popular Southeast Asian dish originating from Sundanese cuisine, consisting of vegetables in tamarind soup. If long beans are unavailable, you can substitute them with french beans or green beans.Sayur asem or sayur asam is an Indonesian vegetable soup. I also added young jackfruit (which is optional, because it can be hard to find as well), and raw peanuts. However, I’ve modified this recipe to use different vegetables as some of them, such as melinjo, are very difficult to obtain outside Indonesia. In the package were: melinjo leaves and fruits, long beans, corn, chayote and young tamarind fruit.
In this recipe, I used a vegetable mix I bought from a neighbourhood vegetable stall. Melinjo is native to Indonesia and can hardly be found outside the country. The most common vegetables used are: young jackfruit, chayote, long beans, corn and the leaves and fruit of a special local plant known as melinjo ( gnetum gnemon). There are always one or two vegetables missing, and that’s perfectly acceptable. Most of the time, the vegetables in the pack will be based on availability, such that even now, sayur asem ingredients are never fixed. In Indonesia, especially in Jakarta, a sayur asem mix can be bought at the market or vegetable stall, containing everything you need to make the dish. As asem (tamarind) trees were thriving on their land, they created a tamarind-flavoured soup and added vegetables from their garden to it, creating sayur asem. The story goes: during the Dutch Occupation, people in Batavia (the old name for Jakarta) were poor, and had to eat anything on hand. According to legend, this dish originated in the Jakarta area during the Dutch colonial period.
Sayur asem is basically a mix of vegetables cooked in a sour tamarind soup, giving it a refreshing, slightly-acidic flavour.
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