Taste Indonesia
Indonesia
Seventeen thousand islands and several hundred ethnic groups, held together at the table by rice, chilli, sweet soy and a mortar and pestle.
Indonesian cooking is built on pounded spice pastes (bumbu) of shallot, garlic, chilli, turmeric, galangal and shrimp paste, fried in oil and then simmered, grilled or stir-fried with whatever the island provides. Java leans sweet with palm sugar and kecap manis; Sumatra cooks hot, rich coconut curries; Sulawesi and the eastern islands grill fish with fierce sambals. Rice is the centre of every meal. Sambal is on every table. Street carts sell satay, bakso, fried rice and fritters after dark, and the warung, a small family eatery, does the everyday cooking for millions.
8 recipes · 1 cuisine
All dishes 8
- 30 min
Nasi goreng
Indonesian fried rice stained with kecap manis, seasoned with shrimp paste and chilli, and finished with a fried egg.
EasyMedium heat
- 25 min
Mie goreng
Mi goreng
Indonesian fried egg noodles with sweet soy, garlic, chilli, greens and a tangle of egg, cooked fast in a very hot wok.
EasyMedium heat
- 1 hr 50 min
Sate ayam
Indonesian chicken satay: kecap manis-marinated thigh grilled on skewers and served with a rough, sweet-hot peanut sauce.
Easy
- 1 hr
Gado-gado
Indonesian salad of blanched vegetables, boiled egg, fried tofu and tempeh under a thick peanut dressing.
Easy
- 1 hr 30 min
Soto ayam
Indonesian turmeric chicken soup with lemongrass and lime leaf, served over rice vermicelli with egg, sprouts and fried shallots.
Medium
- 1 hr 10 min
Bakso
Indonesian bouncy beef meatballs in a clear garlic broth with noodles, greens, fried shallots and sweet soy.
Medium
- 25 min
Tempeh orek
Orek tempe
Javanese sweet-soy fried tempeh: crisp strips glazed with kecap manis, palm sugar, chilli and bay leaf.
Very easy
- 25 min
Pisang goreng
Indonesian banana fritters: ripe bananas in a thin rice-flour batter, fried until shattering and eaten hot.
Easy
Regional cuisines
Think you know Indonesia food?
8 quiz dishes. Optional — Passport stamps still come from cooking.
Take the Indonesia food quizFood history
Indian traders brought spices and curries, Arab merchants brought kebabs and Islam, Chinese settlers brought noodles, soy, tofu and the wok, and the Dutch left bread, cakes and the rijsttafel. Indonesian cooks absorbed all of it and kept the spice paste at the heart. Tempeh was invented on Java; nutmeg and cloves grew nowhere else on earth until the colonial era. After independence in 1945, dishes like nasi goreng, satay, rendang and gado-gado were promoted as national food, and the warung and the push cart carried regional cooking to every city.
Common ingredients
Techniques
- pounding bumbu spice pastes
- grilling over charcoal
- frying in a wok
- slow-simmering in coconut milk
- deep-frying gorengan