Sambal Sweet Potato Leaf

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This sambal sweet potato leaf (参巴番薯叶) is our local zichar style of stir-frying greens in the wok. The sambal sauce (a spicy paste made with chillis, belacan and aromatics) gives this dish a hot and savoury punch. The home-cooked version is so much cheaper than ordering the dish outside so this is a dish that is worth my effort :) This recipe works well with kang kong (water spinach) too.

Related Recipe:

• Sambal Kangkong Recipe

See Also:

• Sambal Long Beans Recipe
• Sambal Shrimp Pasta Recipe

Usually for sweet potato leaf stems, one will pull & discard the strings (pictured above) before snapping them to short pieces to improve the texture. However, I usually skip this as it is time-consuming, and I also dislike the mild milky sap when the stems are snapped.

So most of the time, I just snipped the stems using scissors, and my family says the taste is still good.

I’m using this bottle of instant sambal belacan paste. It saves me a lot of time, not having to make the sambal paste from scratch, which involves toasting the belacan (shrimp paste) and stinks up the kitchen. So this recipe is easy & fast enough for everyday cooking! If you have more time, you can use homemade sambal belacan to replace the instant sauce.

First posted on Nov 2009, updated on Jul 2019.