54 • Healthy food & drink Love at fi rst bite


In her debut cookbook, food writer Lara Lee has penned a love letter to Indonesian cuisine, fi nds Heather Taylor


What are your fi rst memories of Indonesian food? My upbringing — with an Australian mother and Chinese-Indonesian father — was largely Westernised. It wasn’t until my popo [grandmother] relocated to live with us from Timor that my connection with Indonesia began. I used to watch her carve carrots, cucumbers and vegetables into beautiful shapes, to be served alongside peanut sauce and boiled eggs in a gado-gado salad. I remember the smell of Balinese chicken wafting through the house and the fragrance of spice paste. I fi rst visited Indonesia as a young adult with my parents, and we walked along a pier where a fi sherman sat waiting for his catch. T ere were street food vendors and the air was fi lled with the scent of spices — lemongrass, kaffi r lime leaves and chilli — being sautéed in woks.


How would you describe Indone- sian cooking? T e key to creating a tasty Indonesian meal is a balance — of textures, produce and fl avours. A traditional Indonesian meal will feature vegetable, meat and fi sh dishes prepared in diff erent ways, such as steaming, frying or sautéing. T e dish that best sums it up is nasi goreng. Recipes vary, but most start with rice stir-fried with spice paste and a mix of vegetables, tofu or meat, all served with a crispy fried egg on top and kerupuk (crackers) on the side. It’s often eaten for breakfast.


How did you develop the recipes in your book Coconut & Sambal? When I came up with the concept for the book, I wanted to discover the half of my heritage that I had limited


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the base for many Indonesian spice pastes. From here, other ingredients are added, such as turmeric for colour; ginger or galangal to give a peppery or citrussy heat; and kaffi r lime or lemongrass for fragrance. Coconut milk is added for creaminess, fat and fl avour, while tamarind and lime provide sourness, and palm sugar provides sweetness. Many Indonesian dishes are seasoned with kecap manis [sweetened soy sauce] for a deep, sweet and syrupy soy fl avour, and terasi [fermented shrimp paste] is often added in very small amounts to provide umami. Dishes are always seasoned at the end to achieve a balance of salt, sourness, heat and sweetness.


access to growing up — I wanted the recipes to be my love letter to Indonesia, and to reveal another side to it. It’s known for sandy white beaches and yoga retreats, but further afi eld there are 17,000 islands, from the volcanoes of north Sulawesi, where lemon basil and fi ery chilli dominate the dishes, to the narrow streets of Medan in north Sumatra, where Chinese-Indonesian kitchens are famed for rice noodle stir-fries. I began my research with the doyenne of Indonesian cuisine, writer Sri Owen. T anks to her, I was introduced to home cooks across Indonesia. I travelled around the country for a year and amassed more than 300 recipes. Back in London, I whittled them down to 85, and adapted them.


Which other ingredients are key to Indonesian cuisine? Chilli, garlic and shallot form


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Find three of Lara Lee’s recipes along with the full interview inside National Geographic Traveller Food magazine, June 2020, on newsstands now.


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