Indonesian Food Recipe

Introduction

Paradoxically, it is not easy for the visitor to find genuine Balinese cuisine, for the restaurants, food stalls and mobile food vendors generally offer pan-Indonesian or Indonesian-Chinese food. And then there are the countless restaurants in the main tourism areas featuring an astonishing array of international cuisine, from east-west fusion to Japanese to authentic American fast-food. BALI RESTAURANTS But it’s well worth tracking down the true tastes of bali, found in some of the market stalls (especially on the big market day) and roadside warung, and even in a handful of chic restaurants that have begun to realize that adventurous visitors actually want to try authentic Balinese cuisine.

The Balmy tropical climate and occasional layering of volcanic ash that enriches the soil give Bali a superb range of fruits and vegetables, not to mention several varieties of rice. BALINESE RECIPES And it’s not just tropical produce. Up in thecool hills, temperate-climate vegetables such as carrots and cabbage are grown. BALI FOOD Everything from coffee to cloves, cardamom, to corn and grapes to guavas can be found in this fertileland, while fiery hot chillies and vegetables are frequently planted between the paddy fields. TRADITIONAL BALINESE FOOD

As with the rest of Indonesian, Balinese food has been influenced by centuries of foreign trade and by Ducth colonialism. Many of the spices and seasoning used to flavor Balinese cuisine were introduced, including the  now ubiquitous chili (brought to Asia by the Portuguese and Spanish in the 16^th century).  The Chinese, who traded and eventually settled in Bali as elsewhere in Indonesia, have also influenced the food, with noodles, soy sauce, bean sprouts, and beancurd prominent contributions.

Seasonings
spices, herb and range of other seasonings give excitingly different flavours to meat, poultry, fish and vegetable dishes. A heady citrus fragrance is  provided by fresh lime juice (especially from the distinctive lemo bali). Kaffir lime leaf and lemon grass. Ginger and its relatives –the bright yellow turmeric, laos and camphor-scented rhizome known as kencur – go hand in hand with purplish shallots and garlic, pounded to a paste with chillies that range from the plump little fiery tabia bun to long, slender chilies. A distinctive tang is provided by dried shrimp paste, while the sweetness of palm sugar is often offset by yhe sour gragrance of tamarind juice.

Popular herbs include fresh basil, the fragrant screwpine, and daun salam, a long leaf that looks like a bay leaf but has a taste all its own. When it comes to dried spices, the Balinese have a limited range compared, for example, to west Sumatrans.

Apart from black and white peppercons, the Balinese cook makes use of coriander, cinnamon and the occasional cardamom pod or grating of nutmeg. Candlenuts (kemiri) are often ground to give a rich flaour and texture to the spices paste or basa genep, which is the basis of so many dishes.

Although almost all these seasoning are found elsewhere in Indonesian, the way the Balinese combine them, and their cooking methods, make a distinctive difference. Like other Indonesian cooks, the Balinese use coconut milk squeezed from  the grated flesh of a ripe nut to provide a sauce for many dishes. But by firs roasting the cunks of coconut directly on hoat coals, the Balinese add a wonderful, faintly smoky tang to their coconut milk.

The Balinese are sometimes said to be a bit like the Chinese, in that they’ll eat anything that flies except a plane and anything with legs except a table. And it is true that eels, snails and frogs from the paddy fields, along with dragonflies and various  other exotica, sometimes appears on the Balinese tables.

And because the poultry – especially the ducks, which have been marched off to the paddy fields each day to feed and fertilise the growing rice with nature’s recycling system  – is not usually tender, it is often minced with  a cleaver  before  cooking, as are eels and even fish and prawns. One very popular way of cooking is to wrap minced and often highly seasoned meat,fish or poultry in banana leaf and steam it, or else set the packages directly onto hot colas to roast. Known as Tum, these wonderful packages are served at most home cooked Balinese meals.

What to look for

Probably the best-known Balinese dish is babi guling, or suckling pig. Alson very popular with visitors but generally reserved for festivals by the Balinese themselves, bebek betutu is duck rubbed inside and out  with a mixture of fragrant herbs,spices and chilies before being wrapped in banana leaf and steamed. Once the duck is tender, the package is put over charcoal to impart a faint barbecue flavor. Many restaurants will prepare this dish given advice notice.

FOOD BALI Sate elsewhere in Indonesian consist of morsels of meat or poultry threaded on skewers and cooked over charcoal, served with sweet soy-sauce sambal enlivened with sliced chili. A Balinese version, sate lilit, is more sophisticated and infinitely more delicious, consisting of finely minced fish and prawns mixed with pounded herbs and spices and with plenty of fresly grated coconut. If this pounded mixture is wrapped around sticks of fresh lemon grass rather than the normal skewers, the result is positively ambrosial.

BALI RECIPES Too sensible to waste anything that nature provides, the Balinese use the tender heart of the banana stem as vegetable, generally cooking it in spicy chicken stock to make jukut ares. Unripe papaya is also used to make a spicy soup, although in bali the soups are not drunk as a separate course but are enjoyd together with rice an other dishes, the liquid helping to “wash down the rice”.

RESTAURANTS BALI One of the most common fish found in balinese waters is tuna, which is often transformed into a spicy salad. Steaks of tuna covered with a cooked sambal of chili, garlic, shallots,turmeric, ginger and other seasonings are fried. The fish is then flaked and mixed with a fresh sambal fragrant with lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves. The result, sambal be tongkol, will put you off tinned tuna for the rest of your life.

BALI BELLY Even simple grilled fish takes on a new flavor in Bali. Whole fish is seasoned with lime juice, salt and a tangy sambal before being roasted over charcoal and served with fresh tomato sambal. The most interesting vegetable dishes include young fern tips (pakis) with a dressing of garlic and kencur, young jackfruit simmered in spicy coconut milk and the tender leaves of the starfruit tree blanched and mixed with coconut milk and steamed minced beef. All types of leaves, from starfruit to young papaya, young tapioca to spinach, can be used for jukut urab; the leaves are blanched and mixed with beansproutss before being combined with freshly grated coconut, chili, garlic and touch of dried shrimp paste.

BALI RECIPE One of the most refreshing dishes found in Bali is eaten as snack rather than as part of meal. Many simple roadside stalls or warung selling everything from cigarettes to soap powder signify that rujak is on the menu by the preserence of a granite grinding slab and pestle, with a basket of unripe mangoes, papaya, pineapple, plus cucumber and perhaps some fresh yam bean nearby. Ask for a bowl of rujak and the warung ibu will start peeling and sliceing the basic ingridients. Then a few hot bird’s-eye chilies, a chunk of palm sugar and touch of roasted dried shrimp paste will be put onto the Mortar and ground to a paste, with a little sour tamaraind and salt added. If you don’t want it too hot, ask the ibu to go easy on the chili (tidak mau pedes). The result is mouth – puckeringly sour and sweet at the same time,as wll as salty and spicy. Be forewarned the rujak is can be habit forming.

Sweet and Sticky

Like other Indonesians, the Balinese have a sweet tooth and love to snack on cakes dumplings, or tiny finger bananas drenched in syrup or wallowing in sweetened coconut cream. Many visitors have discovered the delights of Black rice pudding or bubur injin, in which a richly flavoured, purplish-black glutinous rice is simmered with white glutinous rice and fragrant screwpine leaves until it reaches the contsistency of a porridge. It is then sweetened with palm sugar and served with thick coconut milk to make what is arguably the archipelago’s most delicious breakfast or snack or dessert or midnight feast.

Since bananas are so abundant, it’s not surprising to find them dipped in batter and deep fried, boiled and rolled in freshly grated coconut or simmered in coconut milk sweetened with palm sugar. Little dumlins of glutinous rice flour combinaed with tapioca flour are cooked in a similar coconut milk sauce to make make jaja batun bedil. Yet another variation on the glutinous rice theme is wajik, a substantial cake made by cooking the rice with water and fragrant screwpine before steaming it with palm sugar and coconut milk. The result sticky mixture is spread and cooled before being cut into chewy chunks.

Balinese  Drinks

You’ll find plenty to quench your thirst in Bali, where it’s a good idea to skip the usual carbonated drinks in favour of such local favourites as young coconut water (kopyor), served with slivers of the tender coconut flesh and perhaps a few ice cubes. Another excellent option is air jeruk, which is juice squeezed from the local green-skinned oranges that have a completely different flavor to the navel oranges more common in the west. This is usually served with a liberal amount of sugar and can be enjoyed either hot (panas) or with ice (es jeruk).

If you see a blender outside a stall or restaurant, you’l know they’re serving blended fruit drinks. These are much like the smoothies found in the west, and they generally consist of fresh fruit, ice and evaroted milk. However, when you add palm sugar rather than boring white sugar and use such fruits as soursop (sirsak), avocado (apokat), mango (mangga), papaya (papaya) and banana (pisang), the resulting es will be incomparable in falvour.

Tea and coffe are normally served without milk but are with sugar unless you specify that you want it pahit. Drinking the local coffee, which is made by stirring the grounds of this kopi tobruk settle and then sip it cse any strange grounds are floating about. But the richly roasted flavor of the coffee makes it well worth the effort.

Should you want to relax over a drink at the end of the day. Balinese-style, you could try the sweet rice-wine or brem, or perhaps the fermented palm wine called tuak. You could, of course, have an Indonesian beer, but when in Bali, why not do as Balinese do?