Just as soy sauce is inextricably linked to Japanese food, sweet soy sauce (kecap manis) is linked to Indonesian. Made by mixing soy sauce with palm sugar (the unrefined sap of palm trees), sweet soy sauce is thick enough to drizzle and has a deep, smoky flavour that is equal parts sweet and salty. In Australia, ABC Sweet Soy Sauce is the best-known brand.

As far as sauces go, it’s the ultimate multi-tasker.

Two of the country’s most popular dishes – nasi goreng and mee goreng – rely on sweet soy sauce for their typical salty-smoky-sweet flavour profiles, with garlic and pungent shrimp paste as supporting players.

It’s an optional extra for some Indonesian-style satay recipes, but try the version Rick Stein made on his Far Eastern Odyssey program, spiced with black pepper, kaffir lime leaves and a lick of sweet soy, and you’ll never go back.

For a quick dinner, you can’t beat pad see ew. Brown off some beef in the wok, and then toss fresh flat rice noodles with sweet soy, a little oyster sauce, garlic and Chinese greens for an instant take-away style supper.

Delicious. magazine food editor Warren Mendes serves it straight-up as a dipping sauce, along with chilli sauce, for his Indonesian-inspired ginger chicken rice, and pairs it with Chinese five-spice for a five-minute prawn and noodle dish.

Pork doesn’t feature heavily in Indonesian diets, but if you want more ways to experiment with the sauce, it’s a natural fit.

Add a hit of caramel sweetness to Chinese-style glazed pork ribs and mellow out the sweetness with ginger and rice wine. Want something even easier? Use it straight-up on a pork fillet for an instant sticky, rich glaze, or mix with garlic and ginger and then brush onto steaks just before barbecuing.

The smoky profile makes it a natural fit for mushroom dishes, too. Try our mixed mushroom san choy bau, with peanuts and crunchy lettuce leaf cups.

That’s not even touching on the usual suspects. Fried rice? Switch out your soy sauce for sweet soy instead, with a squeeze of lime and a sprinkle of sesame seeds to make it next-level tasty. For clear Asian soups, add a little squirt for saltiness (just as you’d add hoisin into Vietnamese pho), and you can even beat a teaspoon into your eggs to instantly season a savoury omelette.