Fruit with Sweet Spicy Dressing (Rujak)

Rujak is a fruit and vegetable salad dish commonly found in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The term "Rojak" is Malay for mixture, is also used as a colloquial expression for an eclectic mix, and in particular is often used to describe the multi-ethnic character of Malaysian and Singaporean society.

In Indonesia, rujak is a very popular dessert. It contains some fruits, usually papaya, bengkoang (jicama), mango, watermelon, pineapple, cucumber, jambu air (water apple), star fruit, raw red sweet potato, green apple and jeruk Bali (grapefruit). The fruits are eaten with special dressing made of grinded sautéed peanuts with palm sugar, chili and tamarind essence. All of the fruits are sliced to bite-size, and put in the dish. The bumbu rujak or thick sweet spicy rujak dressing is poured on the fruit slices. Or you can just stick in the dressing into your bite-sized fruits.

Basically, there are four kind of rujaks in Indonesia: Rujak Ulek or Rujak Bèbèk (fruits and dressing are mashed together (tumbuk or bèbèk in Indonesian) in a wooden mortar), Rujak Serut (the fruits is not sliced in biteable size, but shredded into rough almost paste), Rujak Cingur (literary "cingur" means mouth in Javanese, and indeed beside the noodle and vegetable as the main ingredients, rujak cingur also contains slices of cooked buffalo's or cow's lips. This special rujak fromEast Java has "meaty" taste) and Rujak Juhi (juhi means salted cuttlefish for Indonesian, this rujak contains fried bean curd, cuttlefish, cucumber, noodle, lettuce, cabbages, peanut sauce, vinegar, chilies, and fried garlic).

If you want to try to make the ordinary rujak by yourself, you can put the only fruits that you like, then make the simple dressing. Here is the recipe:

Ingredients (put all the fruits you like):

Mango

Papaya

Pineapple

Bengkoang (jicama)

Green apple

Watermelon

Dressing (Sambal Rujak), grind:

250 fried peanut or

8 tablespoon peanut butter

4 red pepper

3 chili

1 tablespoon tamarind essence

2 teaspoon prawn paste, fried

70 gr palm sugar

1 teaspoon salt

50 ml water

How to make it:

1. Sliced into bite-size all of the fruits

2. For dressing, mix all the grind ingredients with water until it becomes thick dough.

3. Served the dressing separately or pour it on top of the fruits.

Some parts of this article are taken from wikipedia. Photos by moderator and Dwi Firmansyah.