Indonesian Food

Strangely enough, I grew up eating a fair amount of Indonesian food. My parents had lived there before my brother and I were born and my mother has a fairly solid range of dishes that hit a lot of the culinary highpoints. But it’s never been something that I cooked a lot of on my own. James Oseland’s book, Cradle of Flavor, may change all of that. This is a fairly recent book that covers food from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore and is terrific at pointing out the regional differences in all of these cuisines. The recipes are well written and clear, and the whole book is an entertaining read.

I read through various parts of the book the last few weeks and actually got around to cooking some dishes from it last weekend. I opted for three different recipes and actually followed the recipes, well more or less, but certainly more than I usually do, because it’s a cuisine whose subtleties I don’t understand well enough and wanted an “authentic” flavor in order to help get a handle on the flavor combinations. For this meal, I chose the chicken rendang, a Malaysian chicken curry with coconut milk, lemon grass, galangal, fresh turmeric, and lime leaves, caramelized tempeh and chiles, and stir fired greens with chili and garlic, all served with rice.

The chicken rendang was a rich dish with deep flavors of coconut with the punchier citrus notes of the lemon grass, and lime leaves. It was a terrific dish but I was happy that I made other dishes as well, because it might have been too rich on it’s own. The tempeh was a complete winner. My wife was a little wary of it because many tempeh recipes from “hippy” type of vegetarian cuisines are, quite frankly, a little scary. They seem to view tempeh as a meat substitute and think you can simply use it in place of meat, but it can be too earthy and funky in many dishes. This recipe calls for frying the tempeh and then creating a sauce of shallots, galangal, chiles, garlic, tamarind and palm sugar. The end result is a sweet sour and slightly hot glaze that works well with the earthier flavor of tempeh, but also doesn’t mask its actual flavor. It was a terrific recipe and changed both of our minds about tempeh. The stir fried greens, I chose baby bok choy, were simple. It’s a quick stir fry of greens in a chili and garlic scented oil. We’re lucky enough to have a great Asian grocery store near us with very good produce. The preparation was simple, and it enhanced the natural sweetness of the bok choy.

All three dishes worked well and all of the recipes were clear and easy to follow. The book is quite good in explaining certain flavor combinations and with more reading I hope that I start to understand the underlying combinations of the food from this area of the world. It’s a terrific book on a region that is under represented in my cookbook collection.