Ibu Oka is one of the most famous food joints on the entire island of Bali– located in a touristy area of Ubud, Ibu Oka serves some of the best suckling pig. Anthony Bourdain has been here, as have many other food celebrities. Since we stayed around Kuta, the drive was about an hour. I was told we have to go before noon, otherwise the good stuff runs out.

We arrived around 11:45am, and it wasn’t crowded.

As I was walking in, I saw this beautifully roasted as. Since I am not a celebrity, I couldn’t go to back to see the cooking process.

Although you can’t see it, they stuff a lot of herbs and blood sausage in the gut.

The restaurant, or I should say shack.

The portion isn’t too large, and this is $2.50. Apparently when locals go, they give you half off. The sauce on top kind of tasted similar to jerk sauce. Very herby and spicy.

Extra order of skin. There were two types of skin, one was just skin (middle three pieces) and almost candy-like, and the other had a bit of meat attached (outer two pieces). This was the bomb! So flavorful, and the crunchiness was just right. You can also tell how candy-like it is in the picture below. I bet it’s from the belly area since it’s hollow.

Some kind of deep fried pork parts. Eating anything deep fried, without knowing what it is, is awesome.

No wonder this place is famous. My expectation was not too high. I thought pig might be a bit stinky, but I was blown away by how succulent it was, and even the blood sausage was very clean and flavorful. I don’t know what they do to it– from what I saw on the Anthony Bourdain show, they basted it with coconut water throughout, and takes about 24 hours, yet, it was super moist.

Amazing job Ibu Oka.  Hallelujah for Babi Guling!!!

IBU OKA
Jalan Suweta, Tegal Sari No. 2
Bali, Indonesia
T: 361.976345

I took my mom to Bali in December. I loved it. Being a visitor is good, since I didn’t have to deal with too much local crap. Bali, although thought to be one of the best resort islands, is yet a developing country. My friend Tonny and Corey moved there, and they have a fabulous apartment. Yet, their power goes off everyday if we use two air conditioners at once. Their internet connection is pretty spotty, and they have a very limited garbage collection system.

That said, my stay there was great. I learned my lesson of never laying under direct sunlight without using any sun protection though. After two hours at the hotel pool, reading stupid Nicholas Sparks’ Dear John (just because Channing Tatum was on the cover, and saw a preview when I went to see New Moon), I was completely burned. Like a lobster on steroids. Aloe lotion was nowhere to be seen, and hotel shop sold it for $20, which is the price of the local people’s weekly salary.

Anyhow, here are some of the food pics from the island.

Any Balinese restaurant you go, they give you shrimp chips and some kind of thin crispy thing with kafir lime on it. Bali version of a bread basket.

Oxtail soup. Meat wasn’t as edible as you see, but soup was very good.

Vegetable platter. Not memorable.

Prawns in spicy sauce. EVERYWHERE you go in Bali, prawns were never peeled, which was annoying.

Indonesia’s most famous rendung. Beef stewed in spicy coconut sauce. I love this thing.

Took Mom to the local market one morning. These are coconuts. The color is very different from what you think of as a coconut.

Snake fruit. Andrew Zimmern hated this, and it looks weird almost armadillo-like. It tastes like apple that hasn’t ripened. Hard to explain, but it has bitterness to it. I wasn’t a fan.

Various fruits.

Mangosteen. The smaller the sweeter, that I learned from the locals.

Pork being grilled.

No idea what these are. Some were gooey, and others were beany.

Local sweets. They use a lot of rice flour, hence the texture is very mochi-like.

Unripened bananas.

Fresh sardines. Mind you, it’s about 90 degrees outside, and though there was a roof on top of fish area, there was no ice, no A/C.

Some kind of tropical fish.

Just when we turned to poultry area, Mom gave up, and asked us to get the hell out of there. She was like, “This smells and looks horrible, I need to get out NOW!”

Chicken feet. Very demony.

Chicken (or what is this?) head, next to a beak and foot from another sorry creature.

Rambutan. I liked the flavor, but there was this annoying inside skin next to the pit. I bought this at Costco. Yes, Bali also has a Costco where you can buy a digital camera, fresh tropical fruits, and various souvenirs.

Nasi goreng. I like my nasi goreng with a sunny side up egg, but I bet it’s a bit too risky to do so here.

Bali food scene was pretty good and cheap. We went to Four Seasons for lunch once, and burger was $20, which is absolutely outrageous by Bali standards.

After everyday of soy/spice/rice/skewered meats, I was craving Italian food and ended up making bolongnese sauce at my friend’s apartment. One night we went to a fancy restaurant (it was too chic to take pics), yet the most expensive item was a glass of wine my mom ordered. Alcohol in Bali is EXTREMELY expensive, due to import taxes.

Yellowtail from Australia, which is $6.99 here, was over $20. And no one knew how to make a martini. I once ordered a vodka martini straight up with twist, and got olives in it and a side of lemon juice.

Still, it was a paradise. Though it was rainy season, we lucked out and it was sunny almost every day. I will go back any time.

I’ll show you what I created.

Not shown is the homemade tofu. Instead of painstakingly cooking soy beans, I bought soy milk at a Japanese grocery store. It was from a tofu store in Kyoto, and contained just soy and water, so I thought it would make a decent one. Yep, I was right. It was very tasty.

Also I made bunch of Japanese style pickles. For this, I will post a detailed method soon. Unlike western style pickling, Japanese do it a very weird way, very stinky, and uses things like egg shells, rice bran, beer, etc. Sounds fascinating, right? Behold, my obsession with pickling will be revealed shortly.

Below is umami porn. I have a party coming up this weekend, and this is one of the items I will serve. I made them and they are in my freezer waiting to be cooked. My famous dumplings. It’s just ground pork, Chinese chives, ginger, salt, pepper, soy sauce, and egg. I buy skins since it’s too much to make them. How uniformly assembled! I didn’t use Joyce Chen’s dumpling maker, FYI.

Remember my post on the Japanese vegetable delivery service? That huge daikon radish turned into daikon, chicken and pumpkin cooked in soy base soup.

Japanese green pepper (which is a lot thinner than American kind) stuffed with ground pork, with a thick teriyaki style sauce.

My friend went home to Indonesia and brought this back. Krupuk, or shrimp crackers. They are awesome. It’s simple cooking, just fry them.

When it’s dry, it’s just about, say, 3 inches.

Check out this video. It’s ALIVE!!! How it grows is quite amazing. I have no idea what’s in it, but after you fry them, the whole house smelled like fried fish… Pretty gross, and somehow, something was stuck on the frying pan, which took me like 10 minutes to clean. Normal food shouldn’t grow like this, so there must be some foreign ingredients in this. But it tastes good. Shrimp+Cracker+Fried= AWESOME!

Finally, the highlight of this weekend was making authentic New York style bagels. My cooking mind is very bi-polar. While I was making dumplings, I decided to make bagels. I don’t think ahead, and when I feel like making something, I just go buy ingredients and make them. When I was reading about New York style bagel, the key item was malt syrup. So I went to Whole Foods, where I saw Chace Crawford in front, and while I was texting that information to my friend Molly, Bobby Flay was talking RIGHT next to me. My celeb sightings for the weekend!

Back to bagel making. The recipe was something like this.
11 1/4 cups of bread flour
3 3/4 cups of warm water
3 1/2 table spoon of yeast
5 teaspoon of sugar
2 1/3 teaspoon of oil
5 teaspoon of malt syrup
5 teaspoon of salt

Mix water, sugar and yeast, rest it till it kind of bubbles up. Then add salt, syrup and oil.

Add flour, and it makes VERY stiff dough. Knead it for 10 minutes. It was VERY stiff and I almost thought it was too stiff and about to add more water, but it is supposed to be stiff, so I just kept kneading.

Finally it became the shape and texture it should be, and I put it in a bowl to rise.

After its risen, some recipe says to make a string and attach ends to make round shape, but my recipe said to make a tight ball, then put your finger through in the middle and make a hole. What a brilliant idea!

Then the distinctive part of bagel making, you boil them for 45 seconds each side in hot water and malt syrup mixture.

Bake them in 400F for 17-20 minutes, and check this out! This will make umami porn, for sure.

Maybe I have some Jewish blood in me somewhere. Come to think of it, I do sometimes talk like a nagging Long Island mother. That might be why my challah bread, as well as these bagels are pretty close to professional level!

Shalom.

It was our first time cooking skate, although I’ve enjoyed it in Chinese and French preparations. It’s a really cheap fish ($5/lb at the Blue Moon stall in the Greenmarket on Wednesdays!), but offers good texture and flavor–it has very deilcate, flaky and moist flesh, with a slightly sweet and subtle taste.

While trying to decide the best way to prepare it, I found some horrifying, and intriguing YouTube videos of skate/stingray being butchered.

The dish we decided to make is often grilled by street hawkers, apparently, but we roasted it in the oven–essentially the same preparation as cooking fish en papillote or in foil.

Ming’s chili paste recipe called for shallots, lemongrass, chili/jalapeno peppers, limes, ginger, garlic, sugar, salt and Worcestershire sauce (seemed like a questionable addition, so we used some fish sauce and soy sauce instead). I’m sure an authentic rendition would have used belacan, the fermented shrimp paste that shows up in many Southeast Asian cuisines, and I’ve seen several that also use turmeric and coconut milk, which would add a nice richness to the sauce. Also, a ‘real’ food stall operator would probably opt for galangal instead of, or at least in addition to, regular ginger.

After mixing these ingredients in a food processor (the potentially-unappetizing pink color is courtesy of the two red jalapenos that I used, but I think adding some chili powder for color might not be a bad idea), you slather the skate with the resultant paste, then sauté some red onions, grill some eggplant slices, cut some fresh tomato, cook some jasmine or basmati rice, and assemble the ingredients on a banana leaf (make sure to fold the banana leaf over on itself at least twice, since just one layer will easily tear and rip) as follows:

- Layer of onions
- Layer of eggplant
-Ssmall mound of cooked rice
- Thai basil leaves
- Slices of tomato
- Skate wing, with chili paste and scallions on top (two medium wings, at a total of about 1.5 pounds, was enough to feed the two of us for dinner and lunch the next day)

After folding up the sides of the banana leaf packet (bought at the Key Foods here in Sunnyside, but available anywhere with Latino markets), pinning it shut with toothpicks, and baking for 20 minutes or so at 350-400 degrees, the result was aromatic and delicious (and pretty spicy–you may want to skimp on the whole jalapenos or consider seeding them if you’re cooking this for company or people who don’t like extremely spicy food).

Let me know in the comments section if you have any questions about how to make this, and enjoy!

Cheers,
Jennie

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1. The chicken porridge street vendor: the guy goes around the village (mostly) to sell porridge. You can see on one side the cart he carries, pile up of fried chicken dark meat, then some bowls, and the red ‘BUBUR AYAM’ words (means chicken porridge) painted out of that small piece of glass. Some colorful, old tin boxes (ex biscuits’) on the upper side, they are used for storing the fried onions, fried chips, and it is believed that one was used for keeping the money paid. On the other side a big tin pot of porridge sits on a small charcoal stove (did not show very clear in the picture) to keep the porridge warm.

In the below picture you can see the vendor using a spoon to make some sound on the porcelain bowl, it’s the selling ‘call’. A warm bowl of porridge topped with shredded chicken meat, chips, fried onion, plus some sauce and chili, would be a nice and warm treat in the morning for those who are not getting enough time to sit down to have their breakfast at home.

2. A guy was flipping a big bamboo fan to help barbecuing the lamb meat sate (lamb meat skewer) on top of a charcoal grill (the very way used to preserve the heat so the taste would be guaranteed, meat will turn out tender and juicy). You can also see a big pot of peanut sauce sits in there. Antonius was so much fascinated by this ‘basic food’ at the road corner, he could not help but went twice for it (unfortunately i am not a big fan of lamb meat, so he enjoyed the sate by himself :).

In this picture below you can see the sate topped with the rich peanut sauce, was ready to serve, drooling… on the desk you also see a jar contains shallot and cucumber pickles, usually used to add on to the plate, and if you like, one more small spoon of chili. You can order 10 or 20 or even more skewers, and God, what else would you care but just pay the very attention to enjoy this hot food….

3. We had gone through some invites for the seafood at the seafood restaurants during our stay in Jakarta, treated with fried and roasted fish, huge shrimps, shells, crab and what not. But i would show you this very very delicious ‘Smoked crab with cuttle fish spicy sauce, wrapped in banana leaf’. It was done, again, with the charcoal grill, and there is no better seafood can beat it I would say.

Instead of cooking Chinese (which would have caused me a lot of work and too much time to prepare the dishes), I chose to prepare the Indonesian Yellow Rice combo dish. It’s a traditional Indonesian cuisine appeared on any kind of celebration occasions.

I would briefly breakdown the combo ingredients as follows:

1. The yellow rice was cooked with coconut milk, lemon grass stick, indonesian bay leaf (salam), lime leaf, with adequate turmeric powder (to make the yellowish look) and salt to taste.

2. The combo dish was completed with:

• Indonesian beef stew (the dark brown color one), that was my husband, Antonius’ contribution, he is very good at it (it took him a long time to cut the meat, stirred over in the pot etc. :). Materials are: beef shank (cut into pieces), indonesian bay leaf (salam), grinded garlic, shallot, candle nut, chilly, and of course, coconut milk.
• Fried mini potato cake (round shaped, with a bit of ground meat inside).
• Fried mini corn cake (corn pieces battered with eggs, deep fried)
• Chopped fried tofu mixed with shrimp, sauteed with the Indonesian spice.
• Fried pee wee eggs (hard boiled first), mixed/covered with spicy sauce (tomato chunk,chilly, garlic and shallot)
• Shredded fried eggs
• Cucumber pieces to garnish

Each of the above were displayed on top of the yellow rice, made a nice decoration. The base to accommodate the rice is the banana leaf, also is used traditionally to add more aroma to the whole dish.

Happy eating whenever you can,
Jennie

Editor’s Note: Jennie is Tessar’s mom- remember when I raided his fridge? She is awesome and sent me this delicious recipe and pictures above. Drool. If you have anything you’d like to share with other UM readers, I will post under the contributor name “UM Guest”, so please feel free to email me at umamimart@gmail.com

Subway ride to Elmhurst, and Minangasli restaurant was right there. I went there with my friend Tonny, who is from Bali, and he insisted we had to go there to experience true Indonesian cuisine, so I followed..

The place looked like a ghetto Chinese take out, but it felt a lot more homey, only handful of tables.

I didn’t know what to order, so Tonny took care of it, and I still don’t know what I had. Fortunately I had my camera, and took pictures! I am becoming a good blogger.

This was a drink with soy and coconut milk, with some green objects. It didn’t taste much, something similar to tapioca?

A combination platter of: Rendang chunks of beef stewed in coconut milk and chili gravy (top left), Gudeg, raw jackfruit that cooked in a javanese traditional way (middle) and hard boiled egg in some orange sauce. I might be completely wrong with names of the dishes.

Beef was VERY good. Jackfruit tasted like artichoke, curry-ish flavor. Tonny ordered some fruity drink, which contained sweet jackfruit, and tasted completely different from raw version. It’s amazing how people use a fruit in cooking, and resulting in completely different texture, taste, etc.

He also picked up Ziploc bagged shrimp chips thing (again, don’t know the name, it was tasty as well).

Too bad they didn’t have Babi Gling (roasted whole pig).

Although I had to wait so long for subway back, and I was very annoyed by it, I will go back there. There were many other similar type restaurants, including Pho Bang near by.

Minangasli
86-10 Whitney Avenue (Macnish Street)
Elmhurst, Queens
(718) 429-8207