Advertisement
Published: February 28th 2012
"The only thing I think I like better than talking about food is eating."
(Don DeLillo)
It would be near impossible to condense the diversity of Indonesia's cuisine into one single blog, especially considering that I have only spent no more than four or five months in Indonesia over the course of my life. More than this, I have spent most of my time there on the main island of Java, not yet having traveled to Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, Nusa Tengara or the Spice Islands to the far east. Nevertheless, I think I got some feel for some of the basics after three months sitting at the Indonesian table.
Food is a big part of the language every culture speaks and as a visitor in a foreign country words for food are some of the most important for you to know. And the more you know, the better the experience.
If one could assume McDonald's hamburgers with french fries are the obvious symbol for America's popular food identity (meat from beef, potatoes and bread), then perhaps rice, veggies, tofu and tempe (rice as bread, tempe or tofu for protein, and various
vegetables for nutrients) are an apt representation of food preferences for Indonesians on the island of Java. Although steamed and boiled rice are very popular, the fried rice dish nasi goreng is perhaps the most common popular image that is comparable to that of McDonalds; of course, both images are of what is essentially fried food.
These combinations provide protein and starch but the role of vegetables in the diet of Indonesians is definitely much stronger, over ten time stronger according to the graphic after the following paragraph; thus their absence in this example of American gastric preferences (in actuality, full of complexity; for example, Americans actually eat more chicken than beef).
One of the first things I noticed in Indonesia was how small people were compared to the especially large average American; but this seems to be true even compared to most Thais from Bangkok. However, one thing food in Indonesia has in common with McDonald's is the fact that much of the food is fried. It has a real fast food character. Weak infrastructure for strong electricity and refrigeration have made it a necessity until very recently (like much food you get
Soto Ayam
This is the best way to have "Soto" with a spread of veggies and other goodies you add at will. It is one Indonesia's most simple and traditional dishes.on the street in Asia; an Asian version of fast food). Many other travelers I met in Indonesia complained about this aspect of Indonesian food with many actually putting on weight. See the graphics below for global comparisons of body size and meat consumption.
Graphic on Global Meat Consumption:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/meat-consumption-per-capita-climate-change Average Heights and Weights:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_weight I walk a lot and swim nearly every day so this helps with keeping weight under control by feeding my high energy burning metabolism. Swimming was something I did nearly everyday after six hours of Indonesian lessons in order to regenerate my energy and clear the cluttered resources of my head. A year of that and I could have developed a six-pack!
My diet was helped by the fact that I had very good and meticulously prepared meals twice a day at my homestay (Homestay Heru). Breakfast was essentially a healthy western meal (eggs, toast, jam, peanut butter, nutella spread, oats, and a different Indonesian fruit every day; mango; papaya; pineapple) but often with Indonesian choices like rice or bubur (Indonesian porridge made with rice). And Indonesian tea or coffee, a
Soto Ayam
My soto creation ubiquitous aspect of the Indonesian landscape, was always served. Dinner would nearly always be strictly an Indonesian affair often coming in the form of "lauk" (a variety of curries, veggies and meats to be put over rice, including vegetarian options).
Ibu Heru (Ibu means mother in Indonesian) would often include special touches with each meal. Often for breakfast we would get serabi (pancakes made with coconut milk), bika ambon (a springy pastry cake usually made with coconut milk) or local jams (such as the papaya like fruit carica). At dinner time, dessert would always be a seasonal fruit, of which mango was usually the most delicious, while I was there. It was amazing although I still think the Philippines has the best I have ever tasted.
Indonesia's most special fruit is probably bananas. They have more varieties than any other country in the world that I know of. South America may be the world's leading exporter but they are native to Southeast Asia, thus the diversity. There is a fascinating myth from one of the islands of Papua New Guinea (believed to be the center of the banana's origins), where conception of the world
Typical meal at Homestay Heru
Tempe is on the top left just below the meat in the gravy over the rice. Pickled vegetables (I think) mixed with egg provide a nice combination of carbs, protein and vitamins without too many calories. is not immaculate but through the vaginal insertion of three bananas, creating three different lines, by the Melanesian Mother Creator Timbehes. Her children gave birth to the coconut. Erotic imagery aside, she certainly was a queen of productivity giving birth to the world's largest populations of people, bananas and diversity in general. Unfortunately, I have as yet been unable to find her image anywhere. In the meantime, I could easily see her story transformed into a dynamic porn star identity with a fetish for bananas and perhaps other fruits. Wouldn't that be an interesting way to learn about all the fruits available in Southeast Asia? I obviously digress.................
In contrast, the monolithic banana plantation economy of South America symbolized so often in anti-corporate/anti-American lore by the 'evil' United Fruit Company bears no relation to the overwhelming size, color and taste of bananas in Indonesia. This is perhaps because it serves a population, mostly Americans, who don't produce their own food. Any mythology in these equally fruitful lands skirting the immense Amazon and the agricultural laboratories of the ancient Inca empire would likely not involve bananas. Potatoes, maize or chili peppers, which due to their origin there, come
in amazing varieties and would be comparable to the Indonesian banana. The island archipelago that spawned modern Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Melanesian islands cannot be denied as the center of the banana heartland.
Indonesian fruits, like elsewhere in Southeast Asia, are abundant, cheap and quite varied. Starfruits, dragonfruits, durians, mangosteens and coconuts are some examples. An entire blog could easily talk about just one of these. I discovered a tasty sour fruit called kedondong while I was in Malaysia but it is everywhere in Indonesia. Small, green and oval shaped it is a bit like a sour lime, but if you mix it with honey it is an amazing healthy and tasty drink on a hot day. It has a slight astringent aftertaste so it is not for everyone, but for me it hit the spot. I am hoping to find more of it elsewhere as a drink. If you are looking for it, it lacks a good English equivalent, often referred to as a hog plum or ambarella (in Dutch). People give you strange looks when you ask for the juice but with a little patience you can often find somewhere that has it.
Krupuk
The many shapes of these suggest that a craftsman originally shaped them. At Soto Joglo, where I ate lunch nearly every day, they hand-make about four or five different varieties. It is often used in rojak (a popular salad dish) so it is usually on hand and if the seller has a blender all the better.
I don't think Indonesians eat healthier than Americans. They just eat less. Even if their diet is full of unhealthy cooking oil, they eat more vegetables. However, if you are American there are a larger amount of choices to eat healthier if you so desire. More ethnographic work needs to focus on why Americans don't. Quantity of food seems to be the main driver of size, outside genetics, but the overall percentage of meat and protein in the American diet, as seen in the charts above, is clearly very important. In short, it is easy to see that we are what we eat when it comes to body size, but differences in bodily health and mental/physical attributes would require another alternatively imagined blog.
So what are some other notable aspects of Indonesian food? Though many foreigners are desultry about the amount of oil in the food, it is not the worst place to be a vegetarian. Wherever I went, there seemed to be a reasonable selection of vegetarian
options, more so than is usually the case elsewhere. In Yogyakarta, I found two very cool and somewhat innovative vegetarian spots (Loving Hut and Milas, among a number of other choices). For meat eaters, a barbecued dish on-a-stick called sate (Indonesian kebab), accompanied by a peanut sauce, would likely be a hit. Rabbit sate, very common, is a tasty favorite.
The most unique aspect of eating in Java for me was the ever present nature of "tempe"(like Tempe Arizona). Tempe is a fermented cake, often fried, made from soybean. I never saw how they were produced as Ibu bought them at the market. They were then taken home and fried or boiled with some salt and a few spices. Tempe is a little bit salty and the soybean nuts in the middle add a little bit of crunchy texture. I imagine tempe like Indonesia's version of french fries or hash browns, but eaten even more frequently. Like Indonesian potato chips, often made with cassava, there are as many similarities as there are differences. (but with more protein and less fat)
Pecel (Pa chell), a dish made with a potpourri of rice, peanut sauce, nuts,
Pecel
One of my favorites and usually served on a banana leaf like this. tofu, veggies and other crunchables, was one of my favorites. This was especially true when I was on the road because Ibu never served it. Its makeup varied greatly, so it was a nice dish to try in different places. Krupuk (Kroo pook), the light and crunchy shaped ricecakes that came in loopy, wavy shapes were a great compliment to most dishes. They serve a function a little like bread or chips as you can dip or crunch them in-between bites. One favorite in Jogja, gudeg (goo duhg; duh like "duh I don't know")-jack fruit curry, was a dish I desparately tried to like but never did. The jackfruit is often cooked in a coconut sauce with other a number of other vegetables that gave it a slight sour taste. The Northern Thai version of this (called Gang Kanoon), with a watery sour and spicy sauce, is much more my style. In promotional parlance, gudeg is a prideful aspect of Jogja's food culture.
Another one of my favorites was nasi liwet, often given to Solo (Surakarta), as its place of origin. I ate it whenever I could as it reminded of the coconut rice, called nasi lemak,
Gula Jawa
It's True Love. Outside of rice, there is nothing more productive than palms in these parts. It many uses include sago starch, the cottage industry derived from the coconut fruit, cooking oil, spirits, areca for betel chewing, cosmetics, multitudes of building material, animal fodder, medicine, fertilizer, candy, rattan wood, leave wrappers, ropes and of course....palm sugar!! This is the industrial product du jour in these parts....the oil, steel, concrete and agro-business of the pre-industrial world. which I so often enjoyed in Malaysia. In Indonesia it is a bit less oily. You can often watch the street vendors prepare it with the various ingredients which they carry around with them in an ecletic collection of pots and containers. The creamy coconut paste that sits atop the rice is a bit like mixing a little cottage cheese or yogurt in with your rice rather than your oats or granola. Gula jawa, palm sugar, is like the caramel or the maple syrup of the Indonesian world. I love it just plain, sliced off the hockey puck shape it comes in, or mixed in with my tea or dessert. It is a common ingredient in many drinks and desserts. In Malaysia, palm sugar was what most gave cendol (very popular in Indonesia too) its distinctness.
Because refrigeration is less common in Indonesia (especially on the road where the most interesting choices are oftenfound), cool drinks are not my favorite, usually fixed with ice of undetermined cleanliness. However, many of the cool drinks made with coconut milk and a variety of gelatin like chunks are quite nice with gula jawa mixed in. You can often add in
a little tape (pronounced ta pay), a sweet, sour and alcoholic mix made from rice or cassava, to give it some zinginess.
I took several cooking classes at my language school that gave me some insight into soto ayam (chicken soup mixed with salad style vegetables) and herbal drinks. We made wedang sere (a hot ginger based drink) which is the beauty queen of Indonesia's enormous spice drink tradition. Many of the drinks move between a continuum of Chinese medicine to sweet tea. If you go to a place that serves jamu based drinks (jamu means herbs), the drinks that taste like dirt or tree root sit right next to those with a more flowery aftertaste. The most noticeable herbs, native to Southeast Asia, are roots (such as ginger, turmeric and galangal) and people often grow them at home; their diversity resembles bananas. Ginger, as common as corn in the USA, was one of the key spices once sought after by Columbus and later colonial adventurers-cum-traders-cum-empire makers.
We also made beras kencur, a thick cold rice drink sweetened with gula jawa and enlivened with ginger and pandan leaf. Resep Kolak, a light syrupy coconut
milk dessert served with ice cubes was "kicked up a notch" through the addition of cinnamon, cloves and fresh pandan leaf juice. The less hearty setup nanas was sweetened with the fresh pineapple juice and spiced up by cinnamon and cloves. I could have drank it every day if I got the chance. All of the latter three drinks might take some of the edge off the spiciness preferred by most Indonesians. I avoided eating spicy food nearly my entire trip, but these were still very good. Hot drinks made with some of these same spices, herbs and fruits are one of the jewels of Indonesian cuisine. It is a shame I seldom saw them for sale. It makes me think about opening an herbal drink business there. Nothing I have ever experienced is any more enjoyable than sitting somewhere in the shade and relishing a hot drink saturated with the aroma and character of Indonesia's multiplicitous flora.
Indonesian food is not common in New England where I grew up, unlike the Netherlands and perhaps Los Angeles, but I wish there were more of it. I still have yet to explore how far it expands. Although a
Carica
From the town of Dieng, a papaya like fruit. Dieng claims it as its own by I think its origins lie in South America. Nonetheless, it is famous in Dieng. more regular diet might thin me out, it isn't going to make me look any more Indonesian. Popeye likes to say "I em what I em," but I also like to think I am also what I eat. So I hope there is less talking and more eating of Indonesian food in my future cards. I might even learn to better eat rice with my hands, something still practiced by many Indonesians, although fading with newer generations. If you ever thought picking up grains of rice with chopsticks was hard, this is harder and more dirty; especially when eating curry. "I em what, I eat," a rank amateur when it comes to the diversity of Indonesian cuisine and an awkwardly built giant thanks to the bountifulness of American food culture.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.17s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 6; qc: 49; dbt: 0.1151s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Bob & Helen
non-member comment
Yes you are what your eat
Looks like a healthy diet except for the fried rice. I don't recognize any vegetables--seems fruit is primary, along with rice and seitan and other soy products. Glad to see the snake fruit with some of the snakey-looking skin off-what does it taste like? Quite a contrast to other cuisines you have reported on, and the photos really help us Americans know what it looks like as well as what's in it. So sorry to miss the pleasure of eating with you in these exotic places. Love ya---