FOOD in Yogyakarta

From Yogyakarta

Let me tell you, leaving Bali was not easy. The entire time I was there, everyone was asking me “Why don’t you teach in Bali instead of Solo? It’s paradise here!” Check out my “family photo”:

From left to right: Bapak (dad), Ibu (mom), me, Gunggek, and Agung




I was starting to wonder myself how Java would be different from Bali, and if I really would like it there. I’ve been in Yogyakarta now for about 6 days, and so far I have really enjoyed exploring the city. I am currently staying in a rental house with the three other Indonesia volunteers and our two program directors for our orientation. We’re doing one week of ESL teacher training, and 4 weeks of training in Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language)

Because it is difficult to describe what it feels like to walk down the streets of Yogya, I decided that for this post, I would take you through some of my experiences in Indonesia so far through food.

When I was in Bali last week, I was eating salak (snakeskin fruit) all the time. It’s a beautiful dark purple/brown color and has scales all over it. Once you peel it, there are three segments (held together almost like garlic cloves) that you can pull apart and eat! It’s slightly tart and sweet, and is drier than you might expect. I love it!



A common dish around Indonesia is gado-gado, which typically consists of rice, vegetables, meat or tempe, and a peanut sauce. This one’s not too spicy, so it could be a nice introduction to Indonesian cuisine for some. All the volunteers went out for lunch the other day at a warung, which is usually like a large picnic table set up on the side of the street where people come to eat. You order your food and they give it to you with real dishes and silverware. Once you are sitting down, it is polite to talk to the others who are sharing the table with you, so we made friends with a student and a local policeman. When you give back the dishes, you pay for the meal. A typical meal like gado-gado from the streets of Yogya will set you back about 5000 rupiah, or a little over 50 cents.

A typical warung:




Gado-Gado- it's hard to see exactly what it is, but the sauce over all of it is delicious!



A popular type of restaurant here is a Masakan Padang, which has Sumatran style food that is already cooked and stacked up quite impressively in the window. If you’ve seen the Indonesia episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, he goes to a Padang Restaurant and one of his cameramen knocks over the display of plates at the front of the restaurant. I’ve always seen them but never been brave enough to go in and try it. The way this kind of restaurant works is that they bring you a small plate of everything on the menu. You can eat whatever you want, and the waiter will come back at the end of the meal to determine, as if a detective, what is missing. This feast involved rice (of course), beef rendang (beef cooked in lots of spices and coconut milk), singkong (a type of leafy vegetable), fried potato cakes, and lots of organ meats that I wasn’t brave enough to partake in- this time at least!

Discussing what food to eat:




The most recent exciting food experience was just before writing this, when I took a cooking class with the other volunteers at a travel/tourist organization called ViaVia. Everyone reading this probably knows how much I love cooking, so this was a real treat for me. Furthermore, it was actually a Balinese woman that was teaching us how to cook, so it just really reminded me of my anthropological food study in Bali. We learned to make some amazingly delicious things. One of my favorites was the nasi kuning, or yellow rice. It’s cooked in coconut milk with lemongrass, bay leaves, and turmeric (which gives it the yellow color). It’s a common breakfast food in Bali, but I never had any idea how to make it. We also made tempe with peanuts, fried potato cakes, a spicy chicken dish, and jackfruit curry. Most of the dishes were new to me, so I’m excited and ready to try making them on my own. Being able to cook has put me in such a good mood. The other volunteers and I had so much fun making the food and eating it.

Here's Ibu Made showing us how to fry potato cakes:





Our delicious feast, which included (starting at the cone of rice and going clockwise): yellow rice, chicken with spices, fried potato cakes, sweet tempe and peanuts, krupuk (crackers), and jackfruit curry (one of my favorites!)



Are you hungry yet? If not, there’s probably something wrong with you! Indonesia has some amazing food, and most Indonesians also love to eat all the time. This is the kind of place I could really get used to…

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