Sambal kecap

Sweet soy and fresh chilli

Sambal kecap is one of the simplest Indonesian sambals: raw bird's eye chilli and shallot stirred into kecap manis, the thick, sweet Indonesian soy sauce. Nothing is cooked. The sweetness of the soy sauce rounds the chilli's heat, salt and a little lime juice sharpen it, and sliced shallot and garlic add crunch.

Kecap manis is a fermented product made upstream, as described in a 1985 review of kecap and tauco fermentation. The sambal itself is an uncooked mixture, so the fermentation belongs to the bottle and not to the condiment.

A home recipe from Surakarta

An RRI Surakarta page of 30 April 2026, relaying a recipe from Kumparan, uses five red bird's eye chillies, two shallots, one garlic clove, three tablespoons of kecap manis and a teaspoon of lime juice, with salt and MSG to taste. The chillies are ground with a mortar and pestle or a blender, to a fine or a coarse texture, then mixed with the sliced shallot and garlic and the liquids. The cook tastes and adds more chilli for more heat.

It is eaten with satay, grilled chicken and other grilled food, with tempe mendoan (battered fried tempe) and sayur sop (soup), and it can be brushed on grilled food as a marinade or finishing sauce. The page gives no yield and no storage information.

A second version from Semarang

An RRI Semarang recipe of 18 May 2026 is looser: five to seven chillies, two shallots, an optional small tomato for freshness, three to four tablespoons of kecap manis, an optional half teaspoon of lime or calamansi juice and a pinch of salt. Everything is chopped finely and stirred together, and the mixture is left to stand for 5 to 10 minutes before serving so the flavours blend. Its tips are to cut the chillies with kitchen scissors, to remove some seeds for less heat and to choose a good sweet soy sauce.

The two recipes differ in chilli count, in the tomato and in whether garlic goes in, so neither is a national formula. They document home-style variants.

What is not known

Both recipes are contemporary newspaper-style pages. No source here gives a first use or earlier history for sambal kecap, and neither recipe says how long the mixture keeps. The sweet soy sauce does not make the fresh mixture shelf-stable, so make it in small amounts and serve it fresh.