What Indonesia Has Allowed Me To Eat

I haven’t written about Indonesia because, to put it bluntly, it hasn’t given me much to write about. That’s only partially Indonesia’s fault, at least directly. The rest of it is, depending on how you look at it, either not Indonesia’s fault or Indonesia’s fault only indirectly for making me too sick to either be able to eat or care about eating once I was technically able to.

Not to heap more jabs upon Indonesia, but I’m happy to have gotten sick here instead of a country whose food I was more excited about eating.

I went to Yogyakarta for deep-seated reasons that traced all the way back to 2007. When I lived in Papua, I was offered the chance to travel to Yogyakarta to see Borobudur, Prambanan, and all the rest of it, and declined because I thought it would be too expensive. Instead, I spent my winter holiday steaming (and getting food poisoning, too, actually) on Biak, where my then-boyfriend and I got chased out of several hotels for not being married. And then the one that we made it into had doors that only locked from the outside. Creepy!

Anyway, this is all a very long way of saying that I didn’t go to Yogyakarta for the food; I went there to fulfill a 10-year-old regret, and as far as that went: success! The temples were beautiful and unique. As far as the food: research before arriving taught me that food in Yogyakarta is known even among Indonesians for being very sweet. I have trouble with sweetness even when no one else does, so that didn’t bode well.

I will say that, despite (or perhaps because of?) the torrential sugar downpours on all of its food, Yogyakarta is the cheapest place I’ve ever eaten, with no meal ever costing more than $2.50 and most costing under $1. Once I got used to what was likely and not likely to be encrusted with sugar (and what I would and would not tolerate as far as that went) I had some decent meals.

There was the ever-present lele, or small catfish, grilled or fried and served with a square of tempeh, a bowl of white rice, cucumbers, and sambal. The best version was at Waroeng Wiratama Spesial Ikan Bakar, whose sambal was brown, savory, and fiery, not sweet at all.

There was gudeg, an unripe jackfruit curry with loads of spices on paper, but mainly candlenut and palm sugar on the tongue. I had it at Yu Djum, which was the place unanimously recommended to me by everyone on the street and every rating on the internet.

I’ll admit that Indonesia has great soto ayam (chicken soup) although after it being the only thing I could stomach for a week, I never want to eat it again. At its crunchy-garlicky, liver-containing, clean-silky-spinach floating, comfort-food best, it was served outside Borobudur Temple next to a shuttle bus stop.

There was a street stall setting rujak es krim, which consists of several things I don’t like placed together to make something delicious and very refreshing on a hot day. The first component is a pinkish gummy ice cream reminiscent of nail polish remover. The second is copious amounts of sugar syrup. And the third is fruits and vegetables totally inappropriate for sugar syrup being rolled in that sugar syrup: mainly cucumber, green papaya, and mango. But put them together in a bowl and it was almost the best thing I ate in Yogyakarta.

Ubud, Bali, promised to be better, but promptly gave me food poisoning a day after I set foot in it, probably because I stooped to the level of having an avocado salad and a multi-veggie juice at a Western-tourist-oriented place with no other customers – or perhaps because I went to a rib joint and ordered vegetables in bean sauce. In any case, it was a number of days before I could venture out and sample Ubud’s crunchy-granola hippie food. A few eggplant-nori wraps, avocado-seed shakes, pumpkin soups, pistachio gelatos, and kale quinoa breakfast bowls later, I had found my way back to being able to order and digest a wickedly wonderful plate of nasi goreng babi from Warung Makan Bu Rus.

If you’ve spent any time in Indonesia, you know that nasi goreng can either be a feast or a throwaway food that someone mushed together from rice, MSG, and old vegetable trimmings in a wok in his backyard. I’ve had almost exclusively the latter, and after being burned several times, I stopped ordering it somewhere in late 2006.

This nasi goreng was not that. Each vegetable was crisp and accented against the backdrop of the sweet, slick, and savory rice that tasted too of toasted coconut. But the vegetables faded into the background once one of the two precious sticks of pork satay had been tasted, and the rest of the meal planned around how best to maximize the bites so they’d be evenly spread out until the plate was gone. The pork pieces alternated firm (but not chewy) and fatty (but melty rather than gummy) and had a barbecue-flavored glaze that, yes, was definitely palm-sugar based, but allowed the sugar to stay in the background of the smoke.

I’m hoping this meal was a turning point, and that I’ll be able to sample some more particularly Balinese meals like babi guling, bebek betutu, and lawar, not to mention some fresh seafood in the south, near Uluwatu, where I’m going next, but I’ll have to wait for the Galungan holiday to be over before the more traditional places open up again. Until then, it’s back to crunchy hippie food for me, and there are definitely worse fates than that.

Snacking across Asia, part II: China

(...continued from Part I.)

1. Fenghuang, Hunan: Candied ginger

Fenghuang is known for its ginger crafting.  That much is clear with a simple Google.  However, further information about what type of ginger is hard to come by.  Pickled?  Candied?  Sugared?

The shops along the obviously-tweaked-to-look-ancient-but-still-striking streets of Fenghuang sold white sticks that looked like bleached bark.  This might have been ginger.  We walked past a man in practically medical garb working a taffy machine like a jumprope, twirling it and lassoing the air gracefully.

This may have been ginger, too.  Who knows?

What I eventually bought was a baggie of crystallized ginger from shop tucked way off the main road, just because that was the image in my head of how ginger ought to be consumed.  It looked just like the kind you get at Trader Joe's: soft, chewy, and sugared - except that instead of big crystals of sugar, it was powdered sugar.  And also, there was the small matter of it tasting so fresh and dewy and spicy that I may have gathered a handful straight from a passing fluffy ginger cloud.

My fatal error was buying only one bag, thinking it would last me the rest of my trip (about 6 weeks at that point).  It lasted me three days: just long enough that I was on the train to Kunming by then, regretting my decision strongly.

Ruili had something similar, imported from Malaysia, and so did Vietnam, in gigantic plastic bulk containers at the market, but nothing ever quite reached the magic of Fenghuang's.

2. Weishan, Yunnan: Sweet cornbread with fig filling

The dominant sweet in Weishan, The Friendliest City in China, was a jiggly white Jello-like cake lump that inexplicably, when cut into, formed a jagged, baklava-like square, as though phyllo dough were hidden in the midst.

It tasted like paper and soy.  I wished it were interesting.  It was offered as a sample by a pair of friendly (of course) sisters under a cardboard awning.

The rarer sweet carts only came out in the morning, disappearing entirely by about 10am.  From one of these epheremal vendors came something wholly un-Chinese, so utterly random as to almost seem unreal.

This square of cornbread, stuffed with a sweet brown fig filling, would have seemed more at home somewhere in the Mediterranean.  We were soon to see figs in Dali, in the same province, but they were plump, green, and looked almost like apples.  This filling looked like it came straight from a Black Mission.

It was a welcome respite from the bracingly sweet red bean cakes that popped up in every Yunnan bakery we would pass for the next 3 weeks.  Too bad respites work better when they come after the routine, not before.

3. Ruili, Yunnan: Shandong squid skewers

Yeah, that's a lot of place names.

I specify that this squid skewers originate from Shandong because the man who grilled them never stopped talking about his hometown.  He insisted that his skewers were the best in Ruili because he grilled them the way he had learned to grill them all the way across the country - really all the way across, over 1850 miles away.

Here he is, grilling squid the Shandong way, arm-muffs and all:

I don't purport to be able to distinguish squid skewers by grilling style, but I do know that these were more than worth the wait in the tropical rain.  He had the squid divided up into legs and bodies.  I had chosen to try one leg skewer and one body skewer, but he insisted that I choose both legs, since they were 'better'.

He soaked his grill with oil, scraped it flat, placed the squid on, coated it with oil, pressed it hard with his metal press, then let all the juices that pressed out soak up the oil and spices left over from previous orders.  Then, he scooped up the now-fried juices and poured them back over the squid, pressing them out again and repeating the process four or five times, adding garlic and powdered spices towards the end.

Again, I regretted only ordering two after I had returned to the dryness and coziness of my hotel room, and was disinclined to venture out and get more.  We looked for him the next night, but as it goes in China, he'd moved on to a different corner and was never to be seen again.

4. Dali, Yunnan: Fried goat cheese

What we initially thought were tortillas on a stick were thinly-sliced sheets of goat cheese, stuck in the fire until they blistered and crisped!  (And they weren't on a stick, they were shoved ingeniously in the center of one split chopstick.)

That makes more sense than there being tortillas in China.  Duh.

Now, my thoughts on Dali cuisine are well-documented, but occasionally these tangy, pungent snacks would be well-made and when they were, they were otherworldly.  They'd crunch and then melt, leaving a bite on your tongue not unlike Swiss cheese, but with a brown sugar aftertaste.

Next time: Vietnam and Cambodia!

Eating a statue's food

Item #1 on our Tokyo itinerary was a neighborhood, Sugamo, known to the locals as 'grandmother's Harajuku" (obasan no Harajuku) for its preponderance of old ladies and shops catering to old ladies.

It took us a little while, but eventually we got swept up in a tide of canes and walkers and found ourselves on a long, flat, bustling street adorned with tissue paper flags, shops selling lucky red granny panties and the latest in old lady fashion.  There were also tons of pastry bars.

We stopped at the busiest pastry bar, right on the corner across from a temple.  Having spent lots of time both at Good Mong Kok Bakery in San Francisco and at what is supposed to be the most popular egg custard spot in Beijing, I feel quite at ease in a crowd of old ladies speaking a different language, throwing elbows and jostling at counters.  This particular jostling crowd, though, turned out to be a very polite Japanese jostling crowd; I sidled in, dukes up, ready to fight, and the crowd just sort of organically melted away.  My turn came before I'd even checked out the goods!

Eugene eyed a skewer of 4 glutinous-looking balls covered in viscous-looking brown liquid, and as he did so, a lady behind the counter, through gestures, asked what seemed to be akin to 'What are you going to do with this?  Are you going to eat it?'

A strange implication, but one that didn't deter him.  He bought the skewer.  I bought an egg sesame bun.

We stepped back from the counter to try them out.  His skewer oozed mystery syrup onto the napkin it sat on and from there onto the pavement below, rolling and undulating at a glacial speed.

It looked incredibly unappetizing, and his face after he tried it confirmed this - but I still wanted a ball for the sake of holding to my eating-everything-itude.

He held the still-oozing napkin up to my mouth as I gingerly lifted the skewer and turned my head sideways to try and bite off a piece without smearing myself in goo.

It tasted like a lukewarm rice ball covered in a cross between maple syrup and teriyaki sauce.

My lips sticking confusedly to my tongue and teeth, I raised my eyes from the skewer and saw that there were two old ladies standing next to me and peering into my face.  They looked delighted - and very amused.  "Oiishi desu ka?!" they chirped, grinning widely at each other and at me.

I smiled back at them even though syrup was probably dripping grotesquely from my face.

We continued along our way to a statue with a roped queue leading to it: it was surrounded by older people, who were dipping saucers in a bubbling faucet at its feet, wetting one of a stack of washcloths that sat at the faucet's base, and vigorously and thoroughly scrubbing the statue clean before making quick bows and departing.

There were other statues around.

They had offerings at their feet.

Guess what their offering boxes were full of?

We accidentally ate statue food.