Sugar, spice, and everything nice, that’s what Bali
is made of: hypnotic, addictive, perfumed spices are critical
to the production of Bali’s delicious, sensuous, hot-blooded
cuisine. The high, creaking wooden compartments of the typical
Balinese cupboard harbor the flavors of paradise--a tantalizing
visual and cultural array of unusual local leaves, fragrant
roots, barks, seeds, pastes, and pods. Balinese village cuisine
rests on a specific, complex complement of locally available
ingredients, seasonings, spices, herbs, and condiments. Most
Balinese dishes are built around a bumbu (a general term for
spices in Bahasa Indonesia)--a perfectly balanced spice paste
mixture incorporating a range of ancient seasonings and spices
ground together in carefully calibrated proportions depending
on the recipe. This bumbu, referred to as base in Balinese,
is the heart, soul, and foundation of the Balinese kitchen:
it is this complex combining of spices with other aromatic
commodities that gives Balinese food its intriguingly different
flavor. Spice pastes, sauces, and stocks support and define
Balinese cuisine: every chef intitiates the cooking process
by grinding and blending a requisite assortment of spices
into a basic bumbu with a stone mortar and pestle.
Balinese housewives do not buy the component, bumbu spice
collection separately: they purchase it as one complete package
of whole, unground, unchopped ingredients sold by weight (or
in a plastic packet for Rp.5,000) in the traditional market.
Known as base genep (complete spice ingredients)--synonymously
called base gede (a “big bumbu” of all kinds of
spices mixed together) or bumbu lengkap (complete)--this packaged
medley of essential core ingredients includes garlic, shallots,
coriander, turmeric, ginger, greater and lesser galangal,
lemongrass, black and white peppercorns, onions, tamarind,
red chillies, nutmeg, cloves, and candlenuts. In urban Denpasar’s
Tiara Dewata supermarket, bumbu lengkap is packaged in a hard
plastic box container lodged in the produce section: it contains
such whole, raw vegetables, shoots, and roots as lemon grass,
shallots, ginger root, leaves, garlic cloves, turmeric root,
candlenut, greater galangal, and black pepper to be ground
and chopped up at home. Base genep is usually supplemented
with extra, add-on ingredients (shrimp paste, coarse sea salt,
salam leaves, coconut oil, and palm sugar), particularly when
fabricating traditional foods such as lawar and saté.
The extras are purchased separately (although sellers sometimes
include them for free with big orders). In some households
and villages, spices are roasted first to prepare to turn
them into a spice paste. Spice pastes for beef (base be sampi),
chicken (base be siap), seafood (base be pasih), strong meats
such as pork and lamb, and vegetables (base jukut) feature
their own slightly different, individual combinations of aroma,
taste, and color--and special secret twists. Thick and moist,
spice pastes are prepared in advance in large quantities to
be used up judiciously in everyday cooking: one refrigerated
bowl may last two to three weeks and suffice for ten different
recipes.
Bali’s traditional culinary arts tease the tastebuds
and tweak the olfactory glands with fresh ground seasonings,
frying red shallots, simmering shrimp paste, and smoking grilled
satays: the heady, savory smell of Balinese cooking permeates
every family compound, alley (gang), and rural mountain village.
Balinese chefs smell the tips of their spice-laden fingers
from time to time to monitor aromatic, in-progress spice mixtures—the
first “smell check” is done while chopping the
ingredients. The Balinese also use their hands to “feel”
the food they are fashioning in order to ascertain the quality
and texture of special mixtures like saté lilit. Taste
is the final test: they will use taste to gauge the balance
of food cooking and sizzling in the pot to control flavor,
consistency, and spice levels (if the finished product is
too salty, they add extra coconut, and if it’s too hot,
they add palm sugar). Bali’s time, touch, smell, and
tolerance-tested recipes call for an abundant natural pharmacy
of indigenous ingredients, fresh and dried Spice Island powders,
and exotic tropical by-products available at brimming, bustling,
local spice markets and food stalls. The dimly lit, traditional
Balinese market is the seductive, sapphire-eyed, spice planet
dune: completely controlled by women, it is the pounding bartering
heart of local village flavorings and seasonings activity.
Any and all of the following categories and components can
be found in the market—and can come into play in the
Balinese kitchen. Fragrant hard seeds and nuts (base wangen)
include cardamom (kapulaga), sesame seeds (wijen or bijan),
nutmeg (pala), coriander seeds (ketumbar), black and white
pepper-corns (merica), peanuts (kacang tanah), and round,
cream-colored candlenuts (kemiri), used as a thickening agent.
Red clove trees (and coffee plantations) reign supreme—and
find nurturance—in Bali’s cooler, northern mountain
climes. Cloves (cengkeh) have a recognizable, camphor-like
smell and flavor; rarely used in Balinese cooking, they are
rather utilized to make aromatic, Indonesian kretek cigarettes.
Underground rhizomes and roots (base bebungkilan) stars the
excitable members of the ginger family: fresh ginger (jahe),
greater galangal, native to Java (isen in Balinese, laos in
Bahasa Indonesia), deliciously scented lesser galangal, or
resurrection lily (cekuh in Balinese, kencur in Bahasa Indonesia),
and fresh, bright orange-yellow turmeric (kunyit). Turmeric
root (lily family) is regarded as a sacred dye—crucial
to the transformation of ceremonial white rice (and curries)
into the color yellow. Turmeric leaves are not ordinarily
eaten or used in cooking, except as floating flavor enhancers
in traditional dragonfly soup. The “shoots” stand
tall with wild torch ginger (bongkot), whose pink flowers
bloom prolifically in Bali’s home gardens; the bud is
enjoyed raw in sambals and fragrant rice and is added to curries
and soups. Native to Southeast Asia, thin, seductively scented,
tropical lemon grass (sereh) grows in countless compounds
as a grass-like plant.
The sour flavors feature (the juice) and the frequently used
double leaf of the heavenly-smelling, small, round, knobby-skinned,
green kaffir lime (jeruk purut or lemu)--finely shredded with
kitchen scissors into sambal-salad-satay-ready hair-like shreds.
Tall tamarind trees dominate dry areas like Singaraja in northern
Bali: their brown suede pods contain large flat seeds and
a dark red, fruity-sour, soft fleshy pulp which is sold in
snowball-shaped blocks for cooking. Locals climb up the branches
to retrieve the pods and suck out the sweet-sour innards as
a special treat. The Balinese also soak both the seeds (lunak)
and the pulp in water, and strain them into a solution to
impart a sour taste to dishes. Sweet and salty flavors flaunt
two strains of cinnamon: thick, dark brown, Sumatra-bred cassia
bark and real, native cinnamon (kayu manis). (Fragrant cinnamon
trees surround interior highland villages like Sayan.) Fresh,
white, coarse, flaky sea salt (garam) is the only salt used
in Balinese cooking (and contains seventy-four different healthy
minerals); it is kept in a coconut shell as a container. Included
in every recipe, it is produced in coastal regions like Goa
Lawah, Kusamba Beach, Tulamben, and Amed in eastern Bali.
Dried shrimp paste (terasi in Bahasa Indonesia, belacan in
Malay) is a rank-smelling, high-protein, liberally-used primary
seasoning spawned from pounded, fermented, sun-dried crustaceans
or other small fish. Sold “raw” in the market
in small, brown rectangular patties, it is fried, grilled,
or roasted over an open fire, wrapped in foil, and kept in
an airtight glass jar for several months. Kecap asin (salty,
sour soy sauce) and kecap manis (thick, sweet soy sauce) are
commonly used to both flavor and to accompany Balinese food.
