How to make fishballs with 'cuko' (choo-ko) sauce

Mashed 200gr of fish in a food processor or just tear it with your fingers

Add 5 ml of water, 1 tsp of sugar, 1 tsp of salt, 1 tsp of pepper and if you like, 1 chicken bouillion. Mix until all of the ingredients incorporated

Gradually add in 100gr of tapioca. Gently knead with your hand

Slowly knead you get this form. Small tips, the more the water, the more the tapioca.

Form the dough into small balls. If it is too sticky, dust with a little of of tapioca

Boil some water and cook the fishball. When the fishballs become translucent and floating at the surface, take them out and drained

Waiting your fishballs totally drained, let's make the sauce

Mashed 6 chilis (or more) with 3 cloves of garlic.

Boil 2 cups of water and add in your garlic chilis mixture

Add in 100gr of palm sugar or brown sugar

Add in 1 tbsp of dark soy sauce (sweet), salt and maybe, additional granulated sugar. Taste test. Bring to a boil and sugar was soluble. Turn off the heat

Add in 2-3 tbsp of white vinegar. Mix it up. Taste test before finished it offf

Pour the sauce in a bowl. You may filter thw dregs, but I like to have lotsa chilis and garlic swimming on my bowl

Now back to the fishballs. Deep fried is the best but I choose regular pan-fried the fishballs. Small tips: small pops maybe come out from the fish and flashing hot oil from the pan.

Fry te fishballs in about 3 minutes or until no more pops come out. And there you go ... your fishballs or pempek is ready! Now, serving time

Oopss almost forgot ☺ if you have dried shrimp, you can roughly mash it and prepare it for topping

Put some pempek on your serving bowl, drizzled with lots of 'cuko' sauce and topped with mashed dried shrimp. You can also add diced cucumber and yellow noodles in the bowl. Enjoy! 😊