I confess to a serious weakness for food. I keep thinking about it, looking at it, sampling it, reading about it and wondering what I’m going to eat next. Fortunately Bali is an ideal place for this kind of obsession, bringing together wonderful fresh produce with legions of inspired chefs and bakers. With so many new faces in the streets these days, it’s time for a gastronomic update.
First of all, it’s important to understand that there’s currently no organic certification for vegetables in Indonesia. That doesn’t meant there aren’t plenty of growers following best practices for sustainable agriculture in Bali -- there are, but they can’t afford the high cost of international certification. Anyone who tells you that his produce is ‘organic’ means he’s probably growing without chemical inputs. I use ‘chemical-free’ to describe this kind of produce.
In Bali, you can eat like a saint or the most wicked of sinners. Ubud is Bali’s epicenter of healthy eating, and the cafes are full of saints sipping soy lattes and doing their email on tiny computers. (I have a question here. Many of our visitors these days insist on the freshest of chemical-free foods, eschew meat, never touch alcohol and yet smoke cigarettes with their goji berry tea. Not even local tobacco, but Marlboros. Isn’t this a wee bit of a paradox?)
In Ubud you’ll find many restaurants offering chemical-free foods, raw food menus, wheat and dairy-free meals and desserts, and all kinds of wonderful and wicked things being done with local chocolate. Visitors on restricted diets are astonished to find that they can dine out easily in Ubud if they choose their restaurants. Locally produced nuts and seeds, low-glycemic-index red palm sugar, honey, heritage rice and cold-pressed coconut oil are freely available. There’s a rumour that a limited amount of wheat is now being grown in Bali, which will means that some day our baked goods will fall within a 50-mile diet. You can get wheat grass juice, spirulina, flax seeds and goji berries. The supermarkets carry soy and rice milks, Java-made goat cheese and amazing chocolate and coffee. Ubud boasts the only Slow Food Convivium in Indonesia outside Jakarta.
I’ll list the restaurants in Ubud that serve as much chemical-free produce as they can (there may be more I’m not aware of): Bali Buddha, Batan Waru, Cinta Grill, Istanbul Café, Kue, KAFE, Juice Ja, Little K at Yoga Barn, Nomad, Sari Organic, Siam Sally and Terazzo. Some of these also cater to vegans.
Our friendly little Saturday Farmers Market continues to be a magnet for selective food shoppers. The tables groan under a bounty of fresh vegetables and fruit, several varieties of heritage rice, coffee, spices, preserves, bread and pastries. One table offers traditional herbal remedies to order. Another makes fresh soy milk. Regulars arrive to stock up for the week, then hang around to catch up with friends over an iced coffee. The Market takes place on Saturday mornings at Pizza Bagus in Pengosekan and on Wednesdays across the street at the ARMA Café.
If you’d rather have fresh chemical-free produce delivered to your door in the Ubud area, you have several options. Contact Bali Rungu (balirungu@yahoo.com), Big Tree Farms (ningsih@bigtreefarms.com) and Sari Organic at 7801839 for their price lists and delivery schedules.
The baking scene in Ubud has become absolutely deadly to the waistline. World-class bread and pastries are found at Kakian, Kue, Casa Luna and the newly opened White Box on Andong Road.
Too much feasting? Ubud Sari Health Resort offers a week-long fasting cleanse to put the body back into balance.
The raw food movement is alive and kicking in Ubud with Bali Buddha, Kafe, Little K and Ubud Sari Health Resort offering raw food dishes on their menus. David Wolfe, one of the world’s leading authorities on raw foods, will be visiting Ubud the first week of March. On March 5, Villa Gaia in Ubud hosts David Wolfe and Bruce Horowitz for a charity fund-raising dinner party and gourmet chocolate tasting contest followed by dancing. The event will highlight green products from the local community as well as permaculture organizations. For more information, contact villagaia@gmail.com.
It isn’t all bean sprouts and yogurt out there. Ubud happily caters to the carnivore, too, with flavourful grass-fed local beef, wickedly delicious pork ribs and that Bali classic, smoked duck. Bebek betutu, as it’s locally known, is a duck stuffed with a dozen different pungent roots and leaves, trussed in a banana leaf and smoked slowly for hours over a fire of coconut shells. If you’re living here, ask your staff to order one from the village. The Balinese also prepare chicken the same way.
I don’t take any of this for granted. When I unpacked my French whisk and mixing bowls ten years ago, exotic groceries were still pretty rare in Ubud. So I’m grateful for the bounty and delighted that so much of it is now grown locally.
Some of it is very local indeed. Seven years ago I planted the seed of a particularly good avocado, knowing it was a long shot that it would generate fruit of the same quality. My luck was in. This year it began to produce for the first time -- the biggest, butteriest avocadoes I’ve ever eaten. Some of them are real monsters; the largest so far weighed in at 750 grams. The downside of huge avocadoes is that they’re so heavy most of them split when they hit the ground. Not that I have to deal with this issue very often because as soon as the dogs hear the thud of a falling avocado they streak off to find it. By the time I arrive it’s been reduced to a well-licked skin and a pit the size of my fist. The dogs, fat and glossy after a month of avocadoes, loll in the shade and refuse to meet my eye.
It’s a feast out there. Eat well, eat wisely and enjoy exploring Bali’s abundance.
Dragons in the Bath, a collection of Ibu Kat’s stories, is vailable in Bali from Dijon in Kuta, Ganesha Books at Biku in Seminyak and Ganesha Books and selected shops in Ubud. It can be ordered nationally and internationally through www.dragonsinthebath.com <http://www.dragonsinthebath.com>
