Burmese Balachaung
Burmese Balachaung recipe, a delicious onion and dried shrimp relish that is the perfect condiment on your dinner table.
- Prep time
- 10 min
- Cook time
- 20 min
- Yield
- 12 servings
- Difficulty
- MEDIUM
Ingredients
- 5 medium onions (pre peeled weight )
- 10 medium cloves garlic ( pre peeled weight)
- 2.5 cm ginger
- 100 g dried shrimp
- 250 ml vegetable oil
- 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
- 1-2 tbsp fish sauce
- 1/2 tsp Thai style palm sugar
- 4 tbsp red chilli flakes
- 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
Instructions
- 1
Peel, halve, then slice the onions thinly, but don't worry too much about it.
- 2
Peel the garlic and drop into your food chopper.Peel and halve the ginger, and drop into the chopper.Then pulse the chopper a few times to get a coarse mix. Tip out into a bowl.
- 3
Add the dried shrimp to the same, unwashed chopper, and grind a floss-like state.
- 4
Heat the oil in a wok on medium heat and fry the onions for 15 minutes, until they are a deep brown colour but before they burn! If your onions are browning to quickly, reduce the heat to medium-low or even low.Keep stirring every 2-3 minutes so the ones at the bottom don't burn.
- 5
Add the garlic, ginger, dried shrimp, turmeric, palm sugar and 1 Tbsp of the fish sauce to the wok. Stir, then reduce the heat to low and fry for 3 minutes.
- 6
Finally add the chilli flakes, stir well and cook for just 2 minutes, as we don't want them to burn and turn bitter. This is especially important if you are using chilli powder in your balachaung (see article, under ingredients).Taste and add more fish sauce if necessary.
- 7
Take it off the heat and stir in the lemon juice. If you're using amchur add it with the chilli flakes.Transfer to a sterilised jar and leave it to cool to room temperature before storing it in the fridge.See article about making this longer to give as a gift.