Day 61: Makan Semua

Makan semua was the WiFi passcode at Nevin’s place. Nevin was my first Balinese AirBnB host and the password means ‘eat all’. Nevin is a bit of a foodie.

We like to eat too, so naturally Melissa and I signed up for a Balinese cooking class. We were half of the student body of the highly-rated Balinese Farm Cooking School that day, joined as we were by Derryn the New Zealander and Alison the Scotswoman. After an early pickup at 7 we were off to gather our ingredients for the day.

At the market we're taught the various aromatics used in Balinese cooking. Lots of garlic, turmeric, ginger and shallots.

The first stop was the Tagallalang market. This was a real local market — not a place for tourists to load up on Bintang t-shirts — filled with produce in all stages of decomposition. The fish was fresh-caught that morning at 3 AM. This was very fortunate since it was being de-scaled and cleaned right on the street by an amazingly dextrous woman wielding a very slimy knife. She prepared the fish completely without the benefit of refrigeration or of even running water with which to wash. Everything at the market was fresh and would need to be cooked and eaten promptly before it rotted.

Our teacher for the day walked us all around the market but spent most of the time showing us around the aromatics — the ginger, lemongrass, turmeric, galangal and garlic which form the basis of Balinese cuisine.

The market’s produce was fresh. Our next stop had fresher yet. See, the cooking school was not built as a school with a hobby farm attached. Rather, as one of the owners, Wayan Jhon, explained, it was a failed organic farm repurposed as a cooking school. It turns out that it’s hard to sell organic produce with its insect-nibble marks of authenticity when the pesticide-perfect version is nearby.

'Break three leaves of this', and then two bok choi, then an eggplant (a novel white eggplant). We filled out our ingredient list in the farm garden as the plants were described and explained.

Good news for us because the farm is beautiful. We spend the next little while touring it to see the living plants we’d use as ingredients. We saw greater and lesser galangal, longbeans, eggplant (a spookily white variety that turned green when cooked), an unfamiliar varietal of spinach and the completely novel “Choco” which we mistook for the longest time for cacao due to the name.

We gathered up these ingredients at our guide’s very precise direction (“three older leaves of this plant”). It was a wonderful little stroll in the early-morning sun, and a great way to start off the day.

But this is a cooking school, not a play-farmstay, so we got down to the business of preparing our first dishes. The dishes were prepared in two batches: one for breakfast and one for lunch.

Breakfast

We began with a salad. This Balinese salad involves boiling all the ingredients. I suppose its more accurate and less unpleasant to say that some of the ingredients were actually blanched, but in any event we set the water to boil and chopped in some hard vegetables: carrots and eggplant. A while later came the leaves, the spinach et. al.

Next we made a fried tempe dish. Tempe seems to be all over Bali, and like it’s cousin tofu, it has no flavor of it’s own. It needs to borrow the flavor of its neighbors in the dish. Fortunately, this dish’s neighbors for the tempe included ample palm sugar.

It was during the preparation of these first dishes that the unexpected delight of the school started to emerge: the personalities of the staff. Our main teacher had a hard time with english and struggled earnestly. But the rest of the cooks — the ones who really new their stuff and guided our actual cooking — were a lot of fun. We laughed a lot, even when they couldn’t take our pathetic technique anymore and had to jump in.

Lunch

Lunch was much more complicated. It began with the construction of a spice paste, Base Gede which was used for all the plates.

This paste involved a lot of chopping, none of which we did, and a lot of mortar and pestle work, some of which we began but which was quickly taken away from us when our incompetence was revealed. So in the end we “made” Base Gede in the same way a midwife has a baby. Actually, we were much less involved than that.

Paste in hand however we were able to make larger contributions. The first of some fried tuna with a shallot sambal. We massaged in the paste to the fish and set it frying. Meanwhile we chopped the shallots and prepared the sambal.

Next, another technique-heavy task. And another one we failed at. You’d think that putting meat on a stick is a easy job. You’d be wrong. After combining the almost-puréed pork with the spice paste, it was supposed to be applied to the bamboo or lemongrass skewers with a twisting motion. None of us got it, and the cooks stepped in to finish it.

Finally, the pièce de resistance, the curry. Much like a thai curry, we started by boiling some chicken with the hard vegetables to cook them. Then we added the Base Gede and coconut milk, along with the chiles for spiciness. Melissa and I ended up adding a lot of chilis to our dish, so much that the head cook needed to run to the palm sugar bowl for relieve after a taste-test. Victory!

Dégustation & Desert

The two meals were very tasty. Perhaps it’s just a psychological effect; you simply like your own cooking better because it’s your’s and you forgive all the mistakes. Perhaps it’s that the school has picked particularly bulletproof recipes which any novice can execute competently. Perhaps we’re all simply culinary geniuses waiting to be discovered.

Probably that last one. In any event, we were totally stuffed when time came to make desert. Some how we rallied to the occasion and turned out bananas (king bananas — these were monstrous) fried in pancake patter. They were served with shredded coconut and were delicious.

What to do with the remaining batter? Just deep fry it, making “Crispy”.

Joy of Cooking

The cooking school was marvelous. It was well-run and efficient, and the grounds were excellent. But the real joy of it was in our fellow students and the staff. They made the event an incredible amount of fun. And when you have great companions and great food, can you ask for anything more?

Here are some more pictures.