I Like Guava Juice, and other observatio​ns on Indonesian culinary delights

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Good quote from today, as I was getting up to leave my latest interview:

“Oh! And something funny! When you wrote to me saying you were
coming to Jakarta, I was surprised because you speak in Indonesian.
And then you know, it was so funny, I shared it with my wife and
children, you wrote that you stay in Jakarta two weeks, but you say
you meninggal in Jakarta two weeks! Haha! My wife and I thought
it was so funny! And she say oh no, I hope not!”

-Deputy Minister, Ministry of Environment, Government of Indonesia.
Hahahahahhaahha


Dear Everyone,

SO! Here I am at my kitchen table with my laptop, my roommate reading
on the couch with a bad melodrama playing on the Australia Network in
the background. I’ve just put together my first Lentil Soup, which
could more aptly be called an Everything In My Fridge Soup, which is
now simmering in a very inadequately thin-bottomed pot on the stove.
I’m emptying out my fridge because I’ve got less than two more days in
Jakarta, as incredible as that seems to me now! On Thursday I go to
Singapore to renew my visa (where I’ll be staying with the father and
older brother of an extremely sweet girl in my Indonesian class, even
though she’s not there and her mom is visiting family in China. They
have “alerted the maids to my arrival” around 10pm Thursday night, and
apparently her three dogs, cat, and parrot are awaiting me with
anticipation as well. This should be interesting), and then I’ll
hopefully be traipsing happily through the awkward armpits of East
Java and West Kalimantan until my departure for the States in the
first week of August. I really can’t believe I’ve been here eight
weeks already; in the true nature of long trips, it feels like just
last week or the week before that I collapsed in a noisy hotel in Bali
after 30+ hours of travel and 40+ hours of being awake. But here I
am near the end of my research period, futilely panicking because I
feel like I haven’t crammed enough interviews into the past four
weeks! Oh well. What can you do?

Anyway, my REAL reason for writing is to tell you about Indonesian
food. Here is my verdict: Indonesian food is yummy. You know, except
the stuff that involves lamb brains and ox tail and other mysterious
offal, which is delicious to some people but, tragically, I have grown
up in a country where organ meat is not prized and thus its
temptations are lost on me. This makes me sad sometimes, because I
really feel like I’m missing out on something that most of the world
considers truly delectable. But when you don’t grow up with a flavor
as strong as that of iron- and other nutrient-rich organ meat, it’s
really difficult to develop a taste for it, and I have yet to do so.
But anyway.

Indonesia, like any country, has infinitely many regional specialties;
I will, as before, be speaking from my experience on Java, within
which there are regional variations to spare. In Jogya, for example,
people are known for liking “sweet” food, such as the
characteristically Jogya dish called gudeg, made with (unrecognizably)
cooked jackfruit and the “inner skin of beef,” plus various other
proteiny additives over rice. This is not as weird or unappetizing as
it sounds, and is in fact quite good, minus the funky spongy texture
of fried beef dermis (although when I ate this dish I didn’t realize
that the cook had thrown in some colorful hot peppers under the
jackfruit. I was halfway through chewing a bite when I realized I had
accidentally ingested one; panicking, I decided that since it was
already half-masticated I might as well go the whole way! Oooh poor
choices: they happen every day. The whole side of my head ached for
hours). In another regional specialty, “Padang” food (named after its
hometown in Sumatra) is available all over Indonesia, featuring a few
very characteristic dishes and special also for the way it is served:
there is no menu. The wait staff simply brings a portion of
everything for everyone at the table, and you get charged for whatever
you choose to eat. What happens to what you don’t eat is a subject of
ongoing speculation in my mind – do they just serve it to someone
else? They can’t just throw it away, can they? Does the staff eat it?
One of the mysteries of the universe for now, I guess. Buuut
anyway. Where to start? It’s a little difficult to embark upon a
holistic summary of something that makes up such a huge part of my
life, haha! How about I begin with a few things that have struck me
since early on: Food translations. Sugar. Fruit and vegetables.
Tempeh. Indonesian incarnations of Western food.

1. Something about Indonesian food that has struck me as funny from
the very beginning is the number of dishes whose English translations
are comically simple but whose concepts are completely different from
their ostensible American analogs. For example: two of the things
that I often ate in Jogya are the incredibly common dishes of “fried
chicken” and “barbecued chicken.” Neither, however, bears any real
resemblance to its linguistic counterpart, although I guess fried
chicken is indeed fried and barbecued chicken is indeed barbecued.
That’s about where the similarity ends, though. Both of these
phenomena are eaten with a big pile of rice, a few slices of cucumber,
occasionally some boiled or sautéed greens of some odd bitter variety,
a few sprigs of Asian basil, and the ubiquitous sambal (“sambal” is
just a general term indicating some kind of paste-like condiment made
of chiles. Every sambal is different – some are made of ground raw
chiles and other spices, some are sautéed ground raw chiles with other
spices, some are just hot sauces from bottles. Sometimes people make
it with some kind of very fishy ingredient, which I don’t like; my
favorite was a cooked one heavy on garlic. Mmmm). Everything is eaten
with hands; my friends in Jogya showed me how to make the rice into
little balls so it would stick together and you could eat it more
easily, haha. Everything about this meal is awesome – the chicken is
always perfectly seasoned, the rice is always perfectly cooked (and
once they made it with coconut milk, YUMMM), the sambal is almost
always fantastic, and the whole admix plus basil is SO DELICIOUS!

Another of these deceptively simple Indonesian culinary concepts is
“chicken noodle soup.” When I tried this it turned out to be
basically ramen-like noodles, completely unidentifiable but tasty
pieces of meat that they assured me was chicken one minute and beef
the next, some of those slightly bitter greens, a little bit of broth
(in the couple times that I’ve tried soups here, they have never been
truly soupy, but rather more about the solid components), some kind of
liquid I couldn’t identify, sambal, and a ton of sweet chile sauce,
haha. I’ve only had this once, and it was tasty, but nothing to
really write home about – in fact it wouldn’t be particularly
memorable if not for the experience surrounding my trying it,
which…well. I won’t comment until I get to the end, ha. So here’s
that story, truly a gem of my developing world travels:

A few days ago I decided to head down to the less-developed district
behind my apartment complex to try this “chicken noodle” business that
I’d been meaning to get around to for a while. I walked down the
street until I saw someone selling it; I approached the cart, staffed
by a jovial middle-aged Indonesian man, and asked what was in the
soup. Following the usual trajectory of my random food expeditions,
he explained, it sounded good, I ordered and then stuck around in
front of the cart to watch him make it (it always amuses/confuses
people that I do this. I keep hoping that in this way some mystery of
the glorious food I eat in these holes-in-the-wall might be explained
to me, but alas, generally I am just as baffled after watching the
process as before). As I’m standing there craning to see what he’s
adding, I suddenly feel something disconcertingly large making its
nimble six-footed way up my torso inside my shirt. Instinctively I
grab it with my shirt, and turning the material inside out I reveal a
giant, struggling cockroach (Okay. As an amateur entomologist – read:
person who absurdly loves studying insects, as long as they are Over
There and not On Me – I must acknowledge that there are larger
cockroaches out there in the world than this one. But let me tell you
what, a cockroach the length of your finger is pretty friggin’ huge
when you pull it out of the inside of your clothes, thank you very
much). I quickly threw the offending insect on the ground, realizing
then that all around me, all around the guy at the cart, all around
this little storefront in fact the ground is CRAWLING with
cockroaches. EVERYWHERE. Then the people sitting on a bench and
hanging out in front of the little stall selling snacks next door
start pointing at me and saying something, and I can’t understand what
they’re saying until one woman comes up to me and shows me another
giant cockroach crawling up my pant leg (thankfully on the outside
this time). I yell, shake it off and then laugh really hard, because
come on, this whole situation is just ridiculous, hahaha. The woman
on the bench moves over and offers to let me sit beside her, and all
around my feet are cockroaches being routinely squashed by visitor
feet and then swept into the gutter by the daughter of the household.
When my food was ready – food I wasn’t sure I had an appetite for at
this point – the cook led me into the tiny unlit room behind his
stall, furnished with stools and a ledge attached to the wall as a
table. Noticing me wincing at the cockroaches hurrying hither and
thither across the floor in here, too, he kindly offered this advice:
“It’s okay! Just put your feet up!” And thus, I ate my chicken noodle
soup, perched sideways on a stool with my feet on two small propane
tanks, across the small aisle from the daughter of the house, who was
ostensibly chopping vegetables but I think was sent in to solicitously
stomp on cockroaches for the twitchy foreigner (amply appreciated by
said twitchy foreigner). Over the course of my meal, grasping my legs
with one arm to prevent curious intruders in my pant legs, the cook
and his wife, who manned the stall next door, came in to chat with me,
asking me of course where I was from, where I was staying, what I was
doing, if I was married, how old I was, etc (haha, a completely
independent thing that made me laugh was when, after hearing where I
was staying, the woman considerately asked if I knew my way home. At
first I thought I misunderstood her, and then I laughed and didn’t
know what to say because (a) I made it here in the first place, right?
And (b) I don’t know if you noticed, but a pretty unmistakable garden
of 17 gargantuan apartment towers has popped up 100 yards from where
we’re sitting. I couldn’t forget my way home if I tried, and for me
that’s saying something! I replied that thank you, yes, I could find
my way back, hahaha). And there we all sat, perching on our stools in
the near-dark amongst the cockroaches, conducting a lovely dinner
conversation and just generally having a gay old time, because you
know, that’s life. Hahahahaha. Actually the funny thing is, when I
pulled that horrifically huge cockroach from out of my clothes I
didn’t even think about it, the whole thing being just so quick and
kind of surreal, and the meal afterward rather similarly so. It
wasn’t until later that the EEEEWWWWWWW factor really sunk in and I
couldn’t bear to think about it, hahaha. Oh, the developing world.
Never boring! :-P


2. I like the sugar here. It’s not like standard American white
sugar from which all of the molasses has been removed; instead it’s
slightly less refined, more flavorful, something you can actually buy
in the US but it’s more expensive for who knows what ludicrous reason.
Anyway, not only does this sugar make things tastier, in my opinion,
they use it in everything requiring sweetening: high fructose corn
syrup does not exist, and I find it thrilling. Everything tastes so
much BETTER with sugar! Corn syrup is such a painfully pale,
mass-produced Western institution! And the Indonesians really love
their sugar, haha. Everything drinkable is sweetened – tea, coffee,
blended drinks, even fruit smoothies – much to the horror of many
Westerners, but rather to my liking 😊. Do you know what else I like?
Soursop and mango and guava and lychee juice boxes in the refrigerators at
convenience stores, just standard fare. It’s awesome. And I think
that sums it up.


3. So the thing about fruits and vegetables here is, they’re kind of
hard to find. This was surprising to me after Vietnam, where anything
I could ever want in the way of produce was offered in profusion by
women carrying baskets up and down the street in front of my house all
day. Here, though, there are a few large traditional produce markets
in each big city (smaller towns are undoubtedly different), and
vegetables just aren’t sold anywhere else. Occasionally you can find
fruit stalls selling whatever’s in season or imported, but vegetables
are just nowhere to be found if you don’t know where to look. After
some searching around my neighborhood in Jakarta, I found two old
Javanese women with wooden stalls selling vegetables about 2 miles
from my house, and I go there sometimes because the vegetables from
the store in my apartment complex can be kind of icky sometimes. But
the lack of readily available produce baffles me. Where does everyone
go? What am I missing? I don’t get it. I didn’t even make it to the
market that my teachers told me about in Jogya because it was too far
from my house and most of my meals were provided anyway. Weird, man.
I kind of miss all that beautiful produce calling to me from the
sidewalk in Vietnam; it was nice to know where I could get whatever I
wanted whenever I wanted it, and walking 10 feet to spend $0.30 on the
veggies I needed to make dinner was pretty great.

Actually, since I’m on the subject, there are a number of things I
miss from Vietnam. Funnily, when I was there I DESPERATELY missed
some things from home, because some things were just SO expensive or
not available at all over there – everything dairy, most things
chocolate, Western things like peanut butter. Here those things are
still expensive but less so, and pretty readily available (especially
here in the bule ghetto), so I don’t have any unbearably intense
cravings (except at times for a bacon cheeseburger, hehe). But there
are some things I REALLY miss about Vietnam, only one of which being
the ubiquitous availability of fruits and vegetables. First of all, I
really miss Vietnamese coffee. The coffee here is good, but in
Jakarta they don’t really sell plain coffee in developed areas
(they’re more into espresso). Plus there is just nothing on earth
like Vietnamese coffee (haha, I found it on a menu here once so I
ordered it, and it turned out to be a shot of espresso and about an
entire can of sweetened condensed milk, which was really too much even
for me, ha). Also, Indonesia doesn’t have much in the way of small
foods, something you’d eat as a snack but not, you know, processed
“snack foods” like potato chips or something (because there’s plenty
of that nonsense around here). Just something you’d eat when you’re
hungry but not starving. Like at home I’d stop by Panera and get a
whole grain bagel, sliced, no cream cheese because they charge too
much for cream cheese. In Vietnam there was an abundance of these
foods – bao dumplings, spring rolls, simple sandwiches, just tons of
incredibly fresh, incredibly delicious things in small portions
everywhere on the street. I miss that. Lastly, I rather desperately
miss pho sometimes. As I said, I’ve had some trouble finding a really
good soup here, and you know what? Sometimes you just need a really
good soup. When I was in the worst phase of my recent flu, the lack
of pho in my life practically made me cry. There’s something about pho
– very little fat, very simple concept but so much complexity, so many
variations and so much flavor – that is just irreplaceable, and that
makes it one of the best comfort foods you could ever find. Yes, I do
miss pho.

PS, here is another thing related to fruit: I confess. I really kind
of like durian. Especially when they make sorbet out of it and put
chocolate sauce on it (durian is very popular in Indonesia). If you
understand why this is horrifying to most people, you understand, and
if you don’t, you don’t. It’s funky, I admit, but doesn’t smell/taste
like slimy horrific rotting meat to me. Just kind of creamy-slimy
sort-of-rotting overripe fruit. Maybe not my favorite thing in the
world but….really, I kind of like it. Hahaha.


4. Let me tell you about tempeh. Have you ever heard of tempeh? It
is in fact a fermented soybean product that in the US is sold in solid
little cakes in packages at Trader Joe’s. Because of its
fermented-ness it has a bunch of nutrients that regular soybeans and
other, lesser foods don’t have. Basically it’s what hippie vegans put
in their pasta instead of meat and pretend they don’t notice the gross
bitter-sour taste that indicates YOU’RE EATING ROTTEN FOOD. Now don’t
get me wrong, I have nothing against hippie vegans, and actually I
embrace everything crunchy and hippie when it comes to food (I had a
barbecue tofu sandwich with vegan herbed mayonnaise and a vegan
cinnamon roll in Milwaukee that were TO DIE FOR. No, I definitely
have nothing against hippie vegans, especially the Wisconsin co-op
variety). I embrace everything, that is, except tempeh. So you
understand my reticence when I realized that tempeh is one of the main
protein staples around here, along with tofu, eggs, and every meat
under the sun except pork.

But here’s the thing about Indonesian tempeh: HOLY. CRAP. IT IS SO
DELICIOUS I CANNOT EVEN WRAP MY MIND AROUND IT. It turns out that the
fermentedness is not supposed to be gross and bitter and sour and
rotten but rather slightly fermented like soy sauce is fermented, ie.
Just adding a glorious meaty-nutty-umami fantasticness to something
with an already magnificent meaty-nutty-umami texture (if you’re not
familiar with the word “umami,” you should go look it up, it’s very
important to this discussion, and to your life). God, I have yet to
meet a piece of tempeh I didn’t like. Even that one time when the
lady at the food stall gave me that extra piece that was super breaded
and fried, which I usually don’t like, and I wasn’t going to eat it
but then I tasted it and then I ate it all even though it gave me a
stomachache later because fried food makes me kind of sick, it was SO
DELICIOUS. And the awful thing is, you can’t experience this unless
you haul yourself down here! (Which admittedly you should do anyway
because Indonesia is pretty cool, but not everyone has Yale funding
and three months of summer research as a means/excuse to be here).
It’s a crime that this doesn’t exist in the developed world. Or
outside of this island, as far as I can tell. A CRIME. And that is
all I have to say about that.

5. Lastly, I find I’m always entertained by going to restaurants –
especially here in Jakarta where there are several of them near my
house, like the café by the pool – and ordering the Western foods on
the menu, just to see what they come up with. For example, fish and
chips was pretty spot-on, except that they never salt their fries
here, and it was served with a “side-salad” of chopped cabbage topped
with an odd, slightly strawberry-flavored thousand island dressing
(the very few times I’ve had anything like salad here, they always top
it with some creamy sweet weirdness that I can barely stand, being
much more of a non-sweet non-creamy vinaigrette type of person). I’ve
tried two donuts in Indonesia (and I’m not even a donut person): one
tiramisu-flavored phenomenon from an Indonesian company in the airport
that changed my life, and one from Dunkin Donuts – you know, just to
see – that was probably one of the grossest things I’ve ever eaten.
Another interesting thing, one present in backpacker hostels all over
Asia, is the “pancake” – which actually can mean any number of things
depending on the context, but usually when served to
Westerners/backpackers means dough pan-fried in oil, usually with some
chopped-up banana in it. On the other hand, pasta aglio olio was in
fact pasta and was probably made with oil, but it definitely wasn’t
olive oil, and I don’t know many Italians who make their pasta aglio
olio with canned tuna, hot peppers and lemongrass instead of tomatoes,
haha. My triple-decker club sandwich did indeed have three pieces of
bread, lettuce, tomato, and a liberal helping of mayonnaise, but it
also included sliced cucumber, lacked ham (obviously)/roast
beef/turkey, and substituted instead a slice of what was called
“smoked beef” but was really pastrami-like mystery meat, a couple
pieces of grilled chicken, and a fried egg. All of these things have
really been pretty good, ha. I can’t wait to try lasagna and
hamburger! Hahahaha.

So that’s food in Indonesia for you. I’m sure there’s a lot more I’d
like to say that I’m forgetting, but it’s late, and I have two
interviews tomorrow, one of which was moved closer to the other by 3
hours because Indonesian government officials never seem to know until
the night before when they’re going to need to be in important
meetings in, say, Rome (the inexplicable nuances of the inner workings
of the Indonesian government could fill long, complicated and
confusing books that I would have no interest in reading even if they
existed, but in terms of my life they basically mean meetings being
postponed and rescheduled at least three or four times. Oof!). So
good night, see you soon and of course, happy eating…..But not tempeh.
Really, just don’t.

Deliciously umami-flavored love,

Katie 😊

PS: My Fridge Soup can officially be pronounced delicious. Here’s
what’s in it, in case you’re interested: Mass quantities of onions and
garlic (obviously). Carrots. Potatoes. Tomatoes. Mushrooms.
Lentils. Cauliflower. Chicken bouillon. Sketchy Jakarta tap water
that’s probably not going to kill me because it’s been boiled for a
while. Salt. Pepper. Cumin. That crazy “Seven-Spice Mediterranean
Mix” from that Middle Eastern place in the shopping center that I
don’t know what’s in it because it only has a name and a price. Some
fresh mint that my roommate’s friend was trying to get rid of so she
put it in our fridge, because how can you go wrong with fresh mint?
YUM YUM YUM. That is all, carry on. (<<Scarfs soup. Puts lid on pot.
Takes lid off pot, eats more. Puts lid on pot, puts pot in fridge.
Takes pot out of fridge, scarfs more>>😉.

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