Fresh Tomato Sambal

I use this sambal for the Maluku Fish Cakes and Spiced Prawns. That part of eastern Indonesia – the Moluccas, as Europeans used to call the islands – and North Sulawesi still retain a lot of Portuguese influence in their cooking. Whether the local people know that tomatoes, chilli peppers and potatoes all reached here from South America I can’ t say, but the Indonesian word ‘sambal’ can be correctly translated as ‘salsa’.