Blanched greens and sprouts under a hot peanut sauce scented with kencur and lime leaf, with rice and a crisp peanut cracker.
What makes it pecel
Greens blanched, not raw — water spinach, long beans, sprouts, cabbage.
A peanut sauce with kencur, chilli and lime leaf, hotter than gado-gado's.
Rempeyek on the side.
Where it comes from
Pecel is the everyday vegetable dish of Java's interior, and Madiun's nasi pecel is the most famous: rice and greens on a banana leaf, the sauce spooned over, a sheet of rempeyek — a lacy cracker full of peanuts — on top.
The sauce is often made ahead as a dry, sweet-hot paste that keeps, then thinned with hot water when it's needed. It's hotter and more pungent than gado-gado's, thanks to kencur. Pecel lele, fried catfish with sambal, shares the word but not the dish.