home    about me    instagram   

Balinese Cooking

When I asked Koming about a traditional cooking lesson he said that his father’s close friend Ketut from a neighbouring village ran a small cooking class where we learned to make several delicious dishes.

At dawn, we made our way to the early morning market (it starts at 4am and closes at 8am) to talk about ingredients. I watched the bustle of women gathering spices, meat and vegetables for their families and warungs. Ketut walked me through the variety of spices I would use later that day.

Indonesia is known for its shallot and ginger production. I was surprised to discover that Indonesia has five different kinds of ginger, whereas in Canada we only use yellow ginger, turmeric, and galangal. The other two kinds are white ginger — a small ginger that has an extremely spicy edge after the second bite — and a pink ginger also known as new ginger or baby ginger, which has a milder flavour than yellow ginger.

We then made our way to the rice fields in the village of Lalapan, to look at rice cultivation. Rice (nasi) is the main staple of Indonesian food. Even when families are poor, there is always rice to eat. In North America people normally use a pot on the stove or a rice cooker to make rice. However in Bali there is a traditional way of making rice that takes much longer, but the results are delicious! I've never seen jasmine rice cooked in a bamboo steamer before. I've only seen Thai sticky rice steamed in one, so this was a first for me! See the full recipe for Balinese Rice

When we got to Ketut’s home he showed me how his family makes coconut oil by hand. Indonesia is the world’s largest producer and consumer of palm oil, providing half of the world’s supply. However, with its high caloric value and saturated fat content it contributes to weight gain, heart problems and chronic disease. By making coconut oil at home, Balinese people live longer and healthier lives. The process involves breaking a whole coconuts, prying the coconut meal with a knife, grating it by hand, mixing it with water, wringing out the milk through a cheese cloth and boiling for hours on a fire made of coconut husks. See the full recipe for Balinese Coconut Oil

Our next step in understanding the heart of Balinese cooking was to learn about the Balinese bumbu. Bumbu is the Indonesian word for spice mixture, used to season a variety of meats, poultries, seafood and vegetables. It can also be used as a base in stews, soups, sotos, curries, and barbecue. It is one of the most distinctive features of Indonesian cooking as it blends and grinds herbs and seasonings in a traditional cobek ulekan which is a flat mortar and pestle.

The main function of bumbu is to create an intoxicating taste and aroma to the food. However, in the past the preparation of food through spicing was to kill dangerous microbes and improve food safety. Ingredients such as garlic, shallot, ginger and galangal have antimicrobial properties and are used to naturally preserve food and inhibit the growth of microbes.

In Indonesian cuisine there is a vast variety of bumbu spice mixture depending on each regional cuisine tradition and access to local ingredients. For example, Sumatran cuisine has a stronger bumbu flavour as it has access to a larger quantity and quality of spices from the jungle. Whereas I have been told that Flores has a much weaker form of bumbu, as it lacks access to fresh spices, relying on the shipment of spices into the island from the larger neighbouring islands. We've been told that each restaurant and warung has its own bumbu, slightly different from others. See the full recipe for Bumbu Bali