“Achar, the best side dish for me!”
Helloooooo… Long time no post and hope you miss me (chuckles). I promised one of my readers who requested Achar recipe on my FaceBook to post the recipe for her soon. And, I hope this doesn’t come too late for her liking. :) Achar is known to be a Nyonya dish, but well-liked by many other Asian dialects, too. This is an Asian-style pickled vegetables dish which tastes sweet and sourish with a little bit of spicy flavour in it. Achar goes so well with plain porridge, rice, nasi lemak, fried bee hoon, or even to be eaten on its own!
| Blanch and Squeeze dry the vegetables till really dry. Simply pat dry the pineapples. |
Cooking Achar is simple, but the preparation is not so. It involves many steps, from making the seasoning paste (rempah) till cooking the dish… Preparation usually takes up to 1 hour while cooking the dish takes only 5 minutes to complete. As for my version of Achar, I’ve added my open-secret trick to this recipe, the blanching of vegetables including cucumber. Many recipes used just the raw vegetables and they find it taste equally great, but I prefer the additional blanching step (but of course a MUST to squeeze-dry them after that). To me (taught by my mum), the blanching is an important step to retain the crunchiness of the vegetables for even longer time! The standing procedure of the dish is also essential in making the Achar. It is best to store the Achar for more than a day (in the refrigerator) before consumption. This is to ensure the spice flavouring has been fully sponge-in by the vegetables.
Sound complicated? But seriously, it’s worth all the effort! More
