Balinese Food. Vivienne Kruger
parutan (grater). The desiccated dragonflies and grated cassava are mixed with garlic, chili, lesser galangal and seasoning into a soft paste and then fried like a wafer-thin kripik (cracker) until dry, or coaxed into a thick, round fritter. Once the wings are removed, Ubud’s dragonflies get the cordon bleu treatment usually reserved for fish, as pesan capung, grilled dragonfly in a banana leaf roll with spices. Dragonfly soup (kuah capung) is another popular culinary tradition. The wings are removed and the bodies boiled in water with spices and fresh turmeric leaf for added flavor. In northern Bali, Lovina’s dragonflies are simply served grilled with raw sambal matah.
In western Bali, baby bees (nyawan) are often cooked with coarsely grated or shredded coffee leaves (jejeruk nyawan dan don kopi). To produce this dish, bee hives, located in trees or under house roofs, are raided and the honeycomb sheltering live, stingless baby bees is sold in the market or sold by door-to-door street vendors. The entire honeycomb containing still-living bees is boiled whole in hot water for ten minutes, by which time the bees will be well done. The young coffee leaves are boiled separately as they have a bitter taste. The water is discarded and the coffee leaves wrung out and left to dry, after which they are sliced. A sambal sauce is then made of sliced onions, garlic and chili fried in coconut oil. Coconut milk is then boiled for five minutes before the sambal is mixed into it. Lastly, the shredded baby bees, sliced coffee leaves, salt and MSG are mixed together. The natural honeycomb is later eaten separately.
The villagers of western Balinese are also fond of coconut tree larvae, which tastes like milk. They chop down a rotting coconut tree, split open the trunk and look for white larvae (ancruk) inside to be either eaten plain or boiled with chili and salt as a sambal.
Grilled fresh bamboo, called embung (young) tiing (bamboo) tabah (a specific bamboo species) metambus (Balinese for grilled), is another natural food supplement. A short young bamboo tree is harvested and cut down near the bottom of the trunk, up to 30 cm high where the bamboo is tender and sweet. The intact conical tube is then grilled on top of a wood fire until blackened. When done, the outer bamboo bark is removed and the interior is sliced and mixed with coconut oil, grilled chilies and salt to produce a taste resembling gourmet mushrooms. In Lovina, jukut embung (young bamboo soup) is a common village food. The young bamboo stalk is cut, chopped and boiled for 10–15 minutes with bumbu (spices), sambal sauce and salt, and eaten like soup.
Western Balinese also whip up a stupendous Balinese-style sweet-and-sour frog dish called katak bumbu kesuna cekuh (garlic-ginger spice paste), hopping straight from the wet rice fields (sawah) into the frying pan to be fried in oil until crisp. The frogs (katak in Balinese, kodok in Indonesian) are first twisted by the neck until dead and the skin removed and discarded. The frogs are mixed with turmeric, lesser galangal, garlic, chili, brown sugar and tamarind that have been fried together in oil to impart a sweet-sour tinge to the amphibious culinary dish.
Bali’s island-wide rivers, lakes, canals and rice paddies give birth to small eels reconfigured as marinated minced eel in banana leaf and fried rice field eels, commonly served in every warung. Eels (lindung) are plentiful in the flooded, newly planted rice fields. Submerged and hidden during the day in three-foot-deep burrows in the mud, at night they come near the surface to swim and look for food. Local men go to the rice fields to fish by kerosene lantern light, catching them by the hundreds with only a hook attached to a plastic string sweetened with bait from the same muddy fields. Farmers are grateful for the removal of the eels as the creatures’ subterranean digging leads to leakage of the precious irrigation water. Eels are a more rare, seasonal food in drier northern Bali. Here, they are only available and easy to catch in the sawah during the rainy season. River crabs, crayfish, prawns, snakes, legions of busy insects and indigenous local snails are also gathered and reincarnated into a variety of Balinese delicacies.
Succulent golden rice field snails (kakul), a locust-like threat to the rice crop as they can devour the stalks and leaves en masse, constitute an inexpensive and nutritious food resource, as do their common green garden cousins. Rice farmers search for the snails in their paddy fields at night or before weeding the plants during their daily work routine. The snails are subsequently vended live in plastic bags in every tiny village warung in Bali. Living snails can remain intact in plastic for three days. The warung lady takes the unsold snails out of their packages at the end of the day, puts them in water overnight and repackages them in the next morning. The fleshy univalves are made into satay and green papaya soup with vegetables in a dish called gedang (papaya) mekuah (put sauce or broth) misi (with) kakul (snails). Balinese snails also crawl their way into steamed snail with grated coconut and spices, jukut kakul (snails with vegetables), boiled snail curry with spices, grilled snail, fried snail and snail soup with coconut milk. A recipe for snail in coconut milk soup requires 500 g of medium size snails and 100 ml of coconut milk as the basic ingredients. A bouquet of spices (chilies large and small, garlic cloves, shallots, turmeric, greater galangal, ginger and candlenut) is ground and then stir-fried in oil. Snails, salam leaves, lemongrass and salt are added to the pan, briefly simmered in water, and the pièce de résistance—coconut milk—is stirred in until it reaches boiling temperature to produce a classic Balinese kampung specialty.
Another Balinese snail-based delicacy is palem kakul (palem is Dutch for palm tree). The ingredients comprise 200 gm of boiled snail flesh, ¼ grated coconut, 1 tbs palm sugar, various spices (6 cloves shallot, 3 cloves garlic, 2 small chilies, 1 large chili, 1 tsp salt, 1 slice turmeric root, 1 slice galangal, 1 tsp pepper powder, ½ tsp coriander) and banana leaves for the wrappings. Palem can also be made with crab or prawn. To prepare the dish, the snail flesh is first washed, then cut into smaller pieces. Salt is sprinkled on the snails to remove the mucous before they are washed again. The shallots, garlic, chilies, turmeric and galangal are finely ground or pounded. The grated coconut is then mixed with the snail meat, ground spices, salt, pepper, coriander and palm sugar. Tablespoons of this magical batter are then spooned into each banana leaf wrapper, folded and sealed, and the packets steamed for thirty minutes.
True rustic Balinese peasant fare is born not just out of equatorial volcanic abundance but also economic struggle and an agricultural existence which often borders on bare subsistence or real hunger level. In times of mass want or hardship, such as during the communist political upheavals of the 1960s or natural disasters like the 1963 eruption of Gunung Agung, the Balinese give up their beloved steamed white rice for cheaper rice studded with tough yellow corn (nasi jagung) or rice diluted with pieces of peeled and cubed sweet potato (nasi sela) to make it stretch further. (As a poignant legacy of the poverty of “Great Depression,” nasi sela is still sold in the Ubud market.)
A native Balinese tree (pohon taop), which has large, hard, oval leaves, produces an inedible thorny yellow fruit resembling a small jackfruit. The taop tree has attractive leaves four feet long and two inches wide, some entire and some deeply lobed on the same tree. The bright yellow fruit is 7–8 inches long, covered with curved soft spines an inch long. About forty seeds are arranged around a core, and each is surrounded by a soft white aril composed of many fine fibers. The Balinese open the fruit, discard the white-fleshed interior and harvest the nuts, in competition with rummaging local tree squirrels. The extremely hard peanut-like nuts (batun taop) must be smoked over a wood fire or baked before being eaten as a snack. This is a food that the Balinese historically resort to in times of famine. Cashew trees, which grow in very dry soil, are only found in the eastern part of Bali, such as the dry, parched slopes of Gunung Agung, Bali’s most sacred mountain.
Traditional fail-safe Balinese rice field foods continue to be sourced and cooked in house compounds but they are not as popular or as crucial today because so much more food is now available in the villages. As recently as the 1980s, there would only be one warung in each village carrying a very limited range of goods, but now there are many small Balinese-run warung and food is available everywhere. This is a very recent miracle for the Balinese people. In fact, there is comparatively so much food now in Bali that there is no need to cook at home. If the Balinese have money, they can simply go to a warung and buy whatever they want. Tourism-related income has also changed Bali’s food supply, dietary expectations and cooking possibilities. With fewer Balinese solely reliant on hard-scrabble family rice farming, the young generation can aspire to grilled chicken with rice rather than tree larvae and dragonfly soup. Natural calamities, however, have locked some isolated pockets of the rural Balinese into chronic food emergency.