Pressure Cooker Chicken (Ayam Presto) and (Possibly) the Best Sambal Terasi I Have Ever Made

This dish is one of my family's favorite, I prepare it in bulk. Well, not that bulk actually. At least I use 2 chickens, so that I don't have to cook it again in such a short period of time. I usually keep some pieces of pressure cooker chicken in the refrigerator inside an airtight container, and the rest went to the freezer. Whenever I want to serve the chicken, all I need to do is thaw it, and fry. Saves time.

This spice-full chicken, is actually just a regular "ayam ungkep", so we called it in Indonesia. I cook it with pressure cooker simply because I want the meat part to be tender, easy to chew for my little ones. And right now, we are living really close to my father-in law, he is 80 years old, and cannot chew though food. For more, when you cook this chicken using pressure cooker, the spice really really infiltrated, absorbed into the deepest part. Yummmmy! Oh, btw, the chicken recipe was my mom's. She never use shallots to make this dish. And I agree with her, once I try to use shallots, it doen't taste as good. Since then, I only use garlic for boiling chickens.

I also include the recipe of how to make a super yummy sambal, the perfect pair of fried chicken! This sambal is quite similar to mashed sambal or sambal penyetan/sambal pecel lele, Central Java traditional food. Please note the secret ingredients, roasted sesame. Do not skip this, it makes the sambal has a deep nutty fragrance, and freaking delicious!

Ingredients :

- 2 chickens, cut into 6-8 pieces, according to your liking

- 1/2 tsp salt

- juice of 1 lime

- 1 lemongrass, mashed

- 2 cm galangal, remove the skin, mashed

- 2 bay leaves

Grind the following into spice paste

- 8 cloves of garlic

- 1 tsp of coriander seed, you can also use the ground coriander

- 4-5 cm of fresh turmeric

- 3 cm fresh ginger

- 6 candlenut

- 2 lemongrass (only the white part)

- 3-4 cm of galangal
- 1 and 1/4 tsp of salt, or adjust it according to your liking
- appx 150 ml water

psssst...this is the secret ingredients of the perfect sambal!

Chili Sauce with belacan paste
- 12 red cayenne chilies (Indonesian : cabe merah keriting)
- 6-8 bird eye chilies (Indonesian : cabe rawit merah). Be careful with this chili, it's freaking hot! *you can reverse the amount of chilies, if you are a fan of spicy hot sambal*
- 4 cloves of garlic, deep fried 
- 1 regular size tomato, remove the seed and deep fried for about 2-3 minutes
- 1 tsp of terasi/belacan, pan roasted 
- 1 tsp of sesame, pan roasted for about 1 minute
- 1 tsp of coconut sugar, or you can use just regular granulated sugar
- 1/2 tsp of salt, adjust this according to your liking. Some belacan taste more salty than the other, so add the salt in small amount first.
- 3-4 tablespoon of sizzling hot oil (use the oil that previously used for deep frying the chicken), adjust the amount of hot oil according to your taste, the more oil you use, it will get runnier.

How To :
1. Rub the pre-wash chicken with salt and lime juice, let sit for at least 5 minutes. This to remove the unpleasant smell of the chicken. 
2. Arrange the chicken in your pressure cooker, pour the spice paste, add the mashed lemongrass, bay leaves and galangal.
3. Let cook for 30 minutes, the counting starts after the pressure cooker whistling
4. After all the steam is gone, re-cook the chicken with open lid until the water evaporated.
5. Chickens are ready for deep fries.