How to Make Sambal Tomat (Tomato Sambal)

Here’s an easy and amazing sambal recipe which uses oven baked tomatoes. This is a great base ingredient to any spicy food recipe. If you plan on making easy & spicy food, definitely try this one out and perfect your sambal skills!

To make sambal tomat, simply bake tomatoes in the oven, add chillies and spices to your foodprocessor or manual hand grinder and grind together with the tomatoes.

Very easy, only requires a little bit of chopping and should be done within 15 minutes. Let’s get started!

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Step 1: Choose the ingredients

Note: the given kcal count is based on an online calculator and can differ from the actual caloric content of your dish

What to consider when choosing ingredients

I will break down the ingredients here like always, however I must state that this ingredients list is from an authentic recipe. You will not have too much freedom to experiment without deviating from the original sambal tomat.

Equipment

I used a foodprocessor to grind all the ingredients, of course the traditional way is to do it with a hand grinder. This will yield a much more coarse structure, personally I would prefer the food processor structure to the sambal. It is also a lot more convenient and easy to make this way.

Ingredients

The oven baked tomatoes certainly yield a great taste. I wouldn’t recommend using raw tomatoes (you could do it) but maybe try around different types of tomatoes if you’d like. I am in general a huge fan of the tomato used in sambal. As it balances the heavy spicy taste from using only chillies as the ingredient.

Of course you can also play around with the types of chillies and the amount. Personally for me this was a great combination to maintain a very nice spice level. I removed the seeds which of course you can also hold onto. Keep in mind most of the spicy flavors come from the seeds, I would recommend removing most if not all if you are uncertain of what to do. There is really a great difference in spice level so be careful.

Spices

Very short spice list but great results! Terasi is heavily used in Indonesian cuisine and something you cannot skip if you ask me. The sambals in general get such a rich taste from it. Brown sugar to add some sweetness and balance the spiciness even more. Salt to boost flavors but to also preserve the sambal a bit longer.

Add some more spices if you feel like it, try around with some ketjap manis, tamarind paste, palm sugar. Keep in mind you are not cooking the sambal so no point in adding fresh herbs for a short time period. Fresh herbs need heat and time to release their flavors. When altering the ingredients keep in mind this is the traditional recipe.

Step 2: Oven bake the tomatoes and chop the chillies

As I mentioned, the recipe is super easy and apart from collection the ingredients, there is little effort needed.

Preheat the oven to 230C and cook the tomatoes in an oven save dish for about 10 minutes. You want the skin of the tomato to burst to know they are done.

In the meantime, wash the chillies and chop them up. Like I said I recommend removing the seeds, do this by rolling the chillies between your fingers and washing them thoroughly again after roughly chopping them.

Peel and roughly chop the garlic, add the garlic, chillies and spices to a foodprocessor. I can highly recommend getting one if you don’t have it. Find the one I use here.

Step 3: Grind ingredients and store

Once the tomatoes are done, chop them once or twice and add to the food grinder. Grind everything to get the structure of the sambal tomat to your liking. The longer you grind, the finer the structure will be.

I got quite some moist from the tomato which I decided to drain, choose to keep or discard this moist.

Store in a properly cleaned and airtight container, use only a clean utensil when scooping up the sambal tomat. Refrigerate and eat within a few weeks, freeze and eat within months. Always check if the sambal is spoiled before eating.

Don’t forget to have a taste, cry about or love the spiciness and eat with your favorite foods! Use the sambal directly in the cooking pan or serve on the side for a more intense taste.

I hope you like this sambal tomat, let me know what you think and enjoy!

Definitely try out some of my other sambal recipes if you want to know more!

• Sambal dabu dabu
• Sambal oelek
• Sambal kecap
• Sambal terong
• Sambal mangga
• Sambal ikan kacang
• Sambal nanas
• Sambal bali