Balinese cooking class

Since I've started enjoying to cook, I have a curious bug to know the ingredients of the dishes I try and learn to cook them. Also, food is a key aspect of any culture, and to understand the culture better, you need to understand its cuisine as well. That led me to sign up for a Balinese cooking class. Mandar was a good sport and followed suit. 

Snakefruits

Bumi Bali restaurant and cooking school is where we enrolled for a half-day program. They picked us up from our homestay at 8.45 am and we headed along with the other participants to the traditional market.

Our chef was called Nyoman, a lively Balinese who has been cooking for 15 years. Nyoman walked us through the fish market, the fruits, vegetables and roots, palm sugar variants, and finally the Balinese spice mixture and different sauces. I was tempted to buy the local ingredients especially the lesser and greater galangal powder, and would have if not for our long travel. The two types of galangals, along with ginger and turmeric are the four main roots used in Balinese cooking. What was interesting was the use of turmeric in the root form, unlike Indian food where we typically use it in powder form. One of the fruits that was new to me was the snakefruit. It has a snake skin texture and colour thus gets its name. I wonder why jackfruit, breadfruit, passionfruit have been named so.

After the educational market visit, it was time to get our hands dirty. We were back at the school eager to see how the different produce and spices came together. An apron on, and a recipe book in hand for us to make notes, the class commenced.

Satay lilit

Our first item was the basic spice mixture or base gede, similar to a paste (something like "vatap" in Goan food); using roots, whole spices, shallots, garlic and fish sauce. This was followed by "sayur urab", the vegetables with grated fresh coconut. This is a typical accompaniment to most dishes in Indonesian food. Next, was the big dish - the chicken curry or the opor ayam. It was a fragrant and fairly easy recipe once you had you base gede ready. While the chicken was being cooked, we tried the fancy Balinese satay lilit. This was the fun recipe. We had to roll minced meat around lemongrass and wood sticks and getting the technique right wasn't easy. Nevertheless, lots of fun. The final recipe was fried bananas, which were served with a slice of orange and some palm sugar. We gobbled the food instantly. Time well spent.