ACAR SARAWAK is a dish very close to heart! During my childhood years, this is a “MUST HAVE” dish during festive season – especially Chinese New Year.  It is usually served with prawn crackers and almost every household will have this prepared to serve the visitors to their house during the festive season. 

I still remember those days, especially second day for Chinese New Year, we will dress up and gather around amongst our group of friends and start to visit house to house.  Those were the days, where, we cycled from one house to the other, in a group!  It was so much fun!  Those wonderful childhood memories!  These days, I’m sure parents, including myself, are sceptical about that, especially with rising criminal cases involving snatch thieves, drunk drivers and so forth.

Well, back to our star dish of this post – “Acar Sarawak”.  I started my journey to prepare this awesome dish a couple of months back.  I guess the urge to learn was so strong that I started to google for “Acar” and found a lot of recipes for pickled cucumber and “Nyonya Acar”.  The basic ingredients seemed to be similar but the  the texture and taste are slightly different.  I couldn’t find anything close to what I have in mind.  I recalled during the search, I stumbled across a video making Acar in mandarin but there’s no exact measurement provided.  I was so happy and followed some of the steps and began my experiments.  I started to create my own version of Acar.  Each batch were made in small portion and trying to find the “taste” that I recalled and longed for.  After many many attempts, I finally got a close match and decided to share with my siblings for testing and comments.  Those few feedbacks were gladly instilled into the recipe, I  further improvised and finalised my recipe as follows :

Recipes as attached below :

Ingredients

  • 600g cucumber ( I use Japanese cucumber)
  • 300g carrots
  • 2 big red chilli
  • 2 bird eye chilli
  • 3 cloves garlic, sliced
  • 1/2 cup cooking oil or shallot oil
  • 1/2 tbsp tumeric powder
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1/4 cup vinegar (can increase to your likings)
  • 1 tbsp toasted sesame seed, optional
  • 1 tbsp crushed peanut, optional
  • 1 tbsp salt

Acar paste – Ingredients to be blended or pounded.. (I use Tefal mini chopper)

  • 3 cloves garlics
  • 3 bulb shallots
  • 1/2 inch ginger
  • ½ cup of dry prawns (I use Sarawak’s dry prawn, soaked for 1 hour or overnight in fridge)

If you are located outside Malaysia, I have included the links to purchase those similar items from online purchase platform:

 

Tumeric Powder

Dried prawn

Vinegar

Tips :

To get the “crnchy” cucumber – try not to skip this step of drying the cucumber in the sun.  This step is crucial to achieve the texture!  

Methods

For step-by-step process of preparing the Acar Sarawak, please view the attached video clip at the link below :

“How to make Acar Sarawak or Pickled Cucumber – with pressure cooker made easy”

The process of “bottling” gave me great sense of achievement! Hahaha!

Acar Sarawak is best kept in glass jar or glass container and keep refrigerated.  They can be served cold or warm at room temperature.  As Sarawakian, these are just awesome to serve with huge gigantic prawn crackers.  Those prawn crackers are as huge as the wok and it has to be fried piece by piece.

Having homemade Acar Sarawak with prawn crackers especially during Chinese New Year away from home, really felt soooooo good!

I gave myself a pat on the back and said “Well Done! You did it!”  I will continue to perfect this dish until I get 99% close to those back home!

Do give it a try as it is not as complicated as it seems. I’m glad I gave it a go and now this dish is a keeper dish and now I can replenish as at when I want!  My kids have grown to loving them as well!  Even my son who doesn’t like vegetables, love ’em too!  My eldest daughter who dislike carrot, so much so that she will remove every single bit of them from any dish but not from my Acar bottle!  Mommy extremely happy!

P/s : I would recommend using Shallot Oil to give the extra kick in this recipe! 😉

Happy Trying!

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