Peanut satay sauce

A finished Southeast Asian sauce rather than a paste: peanut plus sugar, and usually coconut, lemongrass, galangal and tamarind. Sweet, and sweet enough that a dish built on it needs the salt and glutamate pushed hard to compensate. Not interchangeable with peanut butter or with sesame paste, and it carries a direction rather than just a flavour. In a Chinese context it is best used as a supporting note at a fraction of the binder, because at any real proportion it pulls the whole dish Southeast Asian.