EatingAsia

Guest Post: The Big BM on Bali Babi

After our 'Bali Bound' post went up I received an email from a pork-loving reader asking me to write about the babi guling (roast pig) in Ubud. On this trip we were nowhere near Ubud, and while we did sample a very nice plate of pork on our way from the airport to our accommodations in the northern hills, that was about it. But fortunately for reader Ying, while on Bali we met up with Brett Martin, a Brooklyn-based writer who's as crazy for pig as we are for chilies. After Dave and I returned home to KL Brett and his partner in crime J headed to Ubud, where Brett found porky heaven at Ibu Oka. Below, he rates Bali's babi. (Brett also pays occasional homage to all things porcine on his blog, where you can view a few cool Bali videos. And no, we did not pay him to write that first sentence.)

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Regular readers of this site will notice that this guest post lacks both Robyn's encyclopedic, insightful knowledge and Dave's beautiful pictures. What it does have is pork - really, really good pork. Pork so good, that it currently ranks in my rolling register of Top 5 Pork Meals, a list than also includes, in no particular order: roasted pork belly from Wong Kee, in Kuala Lumpur; spare ribs cooked by Bill Milroy and his Texas Rib Rangers competition barbecue team; the slices of cottechino that come with a bollito misto at Bologna's Restaurant Diana; and the bacon at Brooklyn's Peter Luger Steakhouse. This last, it's worth noting, is nothing more than thick-cut Boar's Head bacon, albeit charred beautifully over Luger's well-seasoned broilers. It just goes to show that sometimes context is the best sauce.

Which brings us back to the babi guling or roast suckling pig at Ibu Oka, in Ubud, Bali. I was there in early March, soon after Nyepi, Balinese New Year. In order to accommodate the holiday's proliferation of religious rituals, Ibu Oka's usual digs at the center of town had been temporarily commandeered and the restaurant relocated to the owner's sprawling family compound. In Bali, 'family' means something closer to 'clan' and the Agung home includes many buildings, set around multiple courtyards. Most of the property had been transformed into makeshift dining facilities filled with lucky eaters: Ibu Oka roasts only five pigs per day, closing whenever they run out of meat. The doors rarely stay open past 2pm. (The place's popularity has apparently been stoked by some guy named Bourdain who put it on his TV show; haven't heard of him myself.)

Mid-meal, a cook went by, bearing a whole, golden brown pig. When I went in search of the piggy source, I was waved along past the kitchen building where huge pots of rice were cooking, past the family temple and a teenager's equally reverent shrine to Guns N' Roses, past a yard filled with fighting cocks housed n woven rattan cages and another kitchen where cooks were chopping baskets of green chilies, finally to a set of concrete pits where, instead of beautifully roasted pigs on spits, I was greeted by five very-much-alive pigs, awaiting their turn the next day.

That this sight hardly diminished my appetite says something about just how good Ibu Oka's babi guling is. Every morning, starting before 6am, the young pigs are killed, cleaned, and stuffed with a rough, savory hash of shallots, garlic, galangal, lemongrass, and chilies. 

They're bathed in coconut oil and then attentively turned by hand beside a scorching pyre of coffee branches.

A few hours later, each resulting portion is like an object lesson in using every part of an animal : chunks of moist rib and shoulder meat; a glistening square of toffee-colored skin; a length of freshly prepared blood sausage; and a crispy scattering of fried offal and crackling - all topped with a sauce made, in part, from the stuffing.

It's enough to make me consider naming my first born Bobby Guling Martin.

What Do You Do With a Squid the Size of Your Arm?

One of the most arresting sights at Butuan City's Seafood Market is the rows of giant squid, slippery bodies big as a small cat, tentacles thick as thumbs, and eyes that are eerily human-like. As I perused the market's offerings thoughts like 'Mmmm, red snapper, chuck it on the grill' and, 'Ooooh, octopus, Italian tomato stew with spinach,'  danced through my head.

Then my gaze fell upon the squid, and the only words that came to mind were 'Now what the he** do you do with that!?'

Luckily our host in Butuan City is quite a kitchen wizard, and during that week of non-stop sport eating he turned out a couple of personal favorites that take advantage of the sea beast's bounty.

Who doesn't love grilled squid? The problem, if you're preparing this at home, is that there's such a fine line between 'done' and 'rubber' that the risk of turning squid into something with a texture akin to a Superball is exceedingly high. With these babies, sheer volume lifts the getting-it-just-right pressure.

After severing (but not discarding) head and tentacles our host stuffed the skin-on bodies with a mixture of chopped onions and tomatoes and laid it all over low coals. We had a long wait for lunch but the wonderfully tender squid rings sporting a good bit of smoky char on the outside were well worth it. Bigger squid means, of course, more tentacles and Dave, an afficianado, especially appreciated the bounty.

Giant squid heads are a bit of a delicacy and our host urged us to give the eye a try. I passed.

The most surprising giant squid preparation we ate that week was an invention of the house: seafood Bicol Express. Bicol Express, a beloved Philippine specialty alleged to have originated in Bicol province (a vendor at Makati City's Salcedo Community Market also also claims to have invented the dish, so who knows), is a fiery dish made with chopped garlic, onions, chilies, pork, and plenty of rich coconut milk.

Our host's twist supplements pork with a variety of seafood (including squid tentacles, the nubs you see below), adds salted black beans, and enriches the coconut milk with smashed chicken liver. This will sound like blasphemy to many Filipinos, I know. (Does coconut milk ever need to be enriched? Liver will obliviate any delicate seafood flavor, right? If you add black beans and substitute seafood for pork is it still Bicol Express?) But the result of our host's experiments (he's been perfecting the dish for years, he says) is a sublime - if very rich - stew that, in spite of the presence of pork and those livers, tastes quite forcefully of freshness from the sea.

Especially wonderful were the squid tentacles, with a texture and flavor resembling small scallops. (And that's seaweed salad in the back, by the way.)

Apologies to those of you with access to giant squid (how do you like to prepare it?) - I didn't think to get the recipe because the beasts are nowhere to be seen in our neck of the woods.

But at least I'll know what to think about the next time I encounter them in a market: 'Mmmmm, giant squid - seafood Bicol Express.'

Time Out Kuala Lumpur

Dave and I are now contributing to Time Out Kuala Lumpur, which launches today.

I'm writing a monthly food feature and the occasional review; Dave's photos will illustrate my feature stories. Time Out KL will be distributed quite heavily around the city, so if you're near a news outlet pick up a copy - the photos are much prettier in print (and most won't make it to the website anyway).

Souvenirs ...

...from a trip we made twenty-three years ago.

Plus ca change ... (The more things change ...)

What Bali Taught Me

There are many things I love about living in this part of the world: that I can buy coconut grated to order. That Dave and I can easily and quickly hop from country to country and culture to culture. That, as each year passes, it becomes ever more obvious that no matter how much I learn about this region and its foods I'll never, ever know it all.

Salak, or snakefruit, are wildly popular in Malaysia and Thailand. I'd seen them displayed for sale in bundles but never knew that that's how they grow, bunched together around a single stem. Nor did I know they're the fruit of a type of palm tree (for some reason I pictured them hanging from tree branches) and that they grow nestled in fronds covered with dangerously sharp spines. Harvesting salak is no easy task.

In the hills of northern Bali male and female salak trees are planted side-by-side to delineate agricultural property boundaries. Dave took these photos in a small village a terrifying fifteen-minute motorbike ride from the nearest road, soon after the trees' owner had graciously wrestled a couple of bunches free for us to try.

I learned something else: all salak are not created equal.

Named for their tough scaly skin, snakefruit have long sat low on my list of beloved Asian tropical fruits. I've eaten them in Thailand, Malaysia, on Sumatra (Indonesia), and in the Philippines, and have always found them off-puttingly pungent, their flesh dry, juiceless, oddly chewy, and more likely than not to leave the inside of my mouth feeling as if it's covered with fuzz. In short, an utter waste of jaw power. 

Balinese salak are a whole other animal, their flesh moist if not quite juicy, giving if not exactly tender. What's more, they're far from stinky, with a flavor that's a pleasant tropical punch-y mix of banana, pineapple, and the tiniest hint of mango. I may have shunned salak in the past but on Bali I couldn't get enough of them.

Another thing I've learned in Southeast Asia: if at first you're not convinced, taste taste again. Malaysian durian converted me to the King of Fruits (native Balinese durian, by the way, give the Malaysian varieties a real run for their money). And Balinese salak did the same for the ugly snakefruit.

Philippine Food Reads: Of Bananas and Drinking Food

The Philippines is blessed with a substantial body of good food writing, both serious literature and research by the likes of Edilberto Alegre and the late Doreen Fernandez, and less 'learned' but nonetheless enjoyable books by professional and amateur food lovers. An hour spent browsing the shelves in the food writing/cookbook section of a Manila bookstore never fails to deliver something surprising and delightful.

In December I found a couple of gems: a thirty-year-old publication by the Philippine Banana Export Industry Association called 100+1 Banana Recipes, and a slim paperback called Pulutan: From the Soldiers' Kitchen. The first is what its title suggests, a straightforward collection of recipes (written in both Tagalog and English) featuring banana as the main ingredient. Included are fairly mundane dishes such as banana muffins and banana pudding, as well as recipes for more curious (to the non-Filipino, at least) concoctions such as banana omelet, banana-stuffed bangus (milkfish), banacorn soup (made with corn grits, unripe banana, and green onion), and banana chicken with ubod (palm heart). It's a quirkily enjoyable illustration of the centrality of the banana in Philippine cuisine - for less than U$5.

Pulutan: From the Soldiers' Kitchen is, perhaps, an 'only-in-the-Philippines' sort of creation: a book of anecdotes and recipes written by two junior military officers serving time for their alleged involvement in what is referred to in the Philippines as the 'Oakwood Mutiny', an event in which some 300 soldiers took over the Oakwood Hotel in Makati (Manila) and declared their withdrawal of support from the government of current Philippine president Gloria Arroyo. The recipes in the book are all for pulutan, a category of food perhaps best explained by the authors:

'Pulutan conveys many things Filipino. That is probably why there is no English word that truly captures the concept of pulutan.

Finger food is not quite accurate because many pulutan are eaten with a fork or with a spoon. Neither is appetizer quite right because pulutan is a meal by itself. In fact, when the plate stops being replenished, that means it's time to go home.

Pulutan conjures comraderie. A drinking session is the Filipino concept of breaking bread. Pulutn is the bread.

The word pulutan has also evolved to mean being a main topic of conversation. If one is absent in a drinking session, he gets talked about and becomes the pulutan. (p. xv)

Each chapter ('All Time Favorites', Goat Meat, Lasang Exotic, 'Not the Usual Parts', etc.) opens with a discussion that mixes memories and anecdotes ('For my twenty-sixth birthday in 2005, I wanted something different to celebrate it with classmates who were also fellow detainees. I didn't want the usual spaghetti and fried chicken.'); Philippine food-related factoids (humba, a pork and vinegar dish, is often served at festive occasions in the Visayas, and a Philippine drinkers' tale says that fathers cook better than mothers because while the latter only learn to cook when they marry, the former learn to cook as soon as they start drinking alcohol); and kitchen tips (when preparing Bloody Belly Grill, an Ilocano dish, 'the swine's blood must be fresh and pure. Do not add water to increase the volume').

Many of the recipes are for dishes that might be 'challenging' to the Western palate. I doubt that I'll ever cook Vampires' Delight, a pork loin preparation that also includes intestines, liver, and fresh blood, or Sinigang na Adidas, sour soup of chicken feet (nails removed). But Ginataang Kuhol (snails cooked with coconut milk, squash blossoms, ginger, and chilies - mussels or other shellfish might be substituted for the snails) sounds delicious, and how can you go wrong with Steamed Stingray?

I love books of this sort for the highly focused and sometimes offbeat slices of culinary culture that they offer the reader.

Ginataang Kuhol (From Pulutan: From the Soldiers' Kitchen, Ellen T. Tordesillas and Yvonne T. Chua, eds.)

30-50 pieces edible snail

2 Tbsp. chopped garlic

4 medium onions chopped

2 Tbsp. grated ginger

1 cup gata (coconut milk)

4 pieces siling haba (finger chile)

1 cup water

1 cup squash shoots and/or flowers

1. Wash the snails in boiling water and set aside.

2. Heat oil in a pan then saute garlic, onions, and ginger.

3. Add snails. Cover pan and cook for 10 minutes.

4. Add coconut milk, siling haba, and water. Cover pan and bring to the boil.

5. When the sauce is thick, add squash shoots. Season to taste.

6. Turn off heat but leave the pan covered for 5 minutes before serving.

On the Saigon Snail Trail

For many food-obsessed travelers to Vietnam the Holy Grail is a fantastic pho. Which is a shame, really, because in the course of a single-minded quest for the ultimate version of this northern Vietnamese soup noodle many equally worthy noodle dishes are bound to be overlooked.

Bun oc (snail and rice noodle soup), for instance, consistently flies under the foreign chowhound's radar. Yet this combination of thin rice noodles with one or another member of the molluscan class of Gastropoda in flavorful broth - also a specialty of the north - is brilliant, easily as delicious as the finest bowl of pho. It certainly was a favorite of a certain formerly Vietnam-based blogger.

We hit Bun Oc Thanh Hai with our friend My late one afternoon last November, after an abruptly aborted tour of a bun factory followed up by an alleyway jelly refresher. The place is a favorite of Saigon's snail afficianados and the molluscan-focused menu is extensive. Bellies full and contemplating dinner in a few hours, we're forced to limit ourselves to just a couple of dishes.

We order bun oc rieu cua (snail and crab noodle soup), which, like many a Vietnamese noodle soup, is served with a gorgeous selection of crunchy herbs and veggies including perilla, fresh basil, mint, bean sprouts, shredded banana blossom, and thinly sliced banana stem (the heart of the trunk of the banana tree). The bowl contains good-sized chunks of not-at-all rubbery snail meat and tomato, bits of crab, and slippery noodles in a punchy pork and crab broth. Floating on top are crab dumplings so light and delicate that they literally dissolve on the tongue.

What's special about this version, My tells us, is the addition of just a bit of vinegar made from rice wine dregs. We get a saucer of the stuff on the side upon request - it's lightly sour and just barely alcoholic, a fine addition to the sweet-savory broth.

We follow up our bun soup with a favorite Vietnamese snail dish - oc hap nhoi thit, or stuffed snails. For this dish the snail is removed from its shell and minced and mixed with lemongrass, lots of strong black Vietnamese pepper, and other spices. It's served with a ginger-vinegar-chile dip reminiscent of the one that will accompany our chao vit the next afternoon. Like duck, snails are a 'heaty' food; cooling ginger provides a balance. This version of oc hap nhoi thit is peppery and lemony and very snail-ish (in a good way); we find ourselves popping the little snail plugs into our mouths one after the other in defiance of groaning stomachs.

Bun Oc Thanh Hai's gregarious owner was a farmer in Thanh Binh, in the north, before moving to Saigon in 1981. She was an ambulatory seller, peddling bun oc from fixings carried on opposite ends of a shoulder pole, for four years before setting up her always busy shop in District 3. 

Over noodles and stuffed snails we ponder the French influence on Vietnamese food, wondering if escargot inspired oc hap nhoi thit. I would wager that snails were a part of the Vietnamese culinary repertoire long before escargot made an appearance in the country; they (and paddy crabs) are eaten by nearly every Southeast Asian rice-growing (or formerly rice-growing) populace. But stuffed snails? That, I suppose, is a question for a Vietnamese food historian.

Bun Oc Thanh Hai, 14/12 Ky Dong Street, District 3, Saigon. Tel. 08-8-435-785. This shop is located on an alley that cuts off an alley that cuts off a main road; I haven't a clue how to find it. Do yourself a favor - have your hotel receptionist (or a Vietnamese friend) call for directions. Or you might try following the directions in Graham Holliday's review of the place, prompted by a tip he received from a snail-loving local, here.

The Tree of Life (Part 3)

The trunk of the sago palm hides more than carbohydrates.

If the tree is cut down and left on the ground - or if the trunk is split open and its shavings set aside in a container - for about three months, the eggs of a type of beetle hatch into plump white larvae that are a well-loved (by some) source of protein.

After we'd seen the sago's trunk processed into flour and sampled a few sago starch snacks, we turned our attention to sago worms. Longtime readers of EatingAsia know that we are not 'adventure eaters' and that we have a problem with the 'Bizarre Foods' approach to food travel reportage. We don't land in a locale and ask to be directed to the weirdest, wackiest, wildest food possible, because we're interested in learning about cultures and people via their food, not in characterizing a locale's cuisine based on the Eeewwww Factor.

But, we came to Banza barangay to learn how a palm tree is turned into a foodstuff basic to many Southeast Asian cuisines. The larvae that grow in the sago palm are also eaten. It seemed to be something we should investigate.

In this case the larvae were 'incubated' in a mound of sago trunk shavings. After the critters are unearthed they're dropped in a cup of water for a rinse.

The worms varied in size from about two to five or six centimeters. Squishing one in half reveals the source of their appeal: sago worms are nothing but head and gooey fat.

Here, the worms are often eaten as is, uncooked, just popped in the mouth after perhaps a dip in nipa vinegar or tuba (sago worm kinilaw, as it were).

We couldn't go there, and here's where nurture-not-nature comes into play. We simply could not bring ourselves to place one of those fat, wriggling things in our mouths. Our Filipino companion, a Manila native, had come determined to try sago worm kinilaw. He couldn't do it either.

Happily for us - because we did want to taste the worms in one form or another - they're also eaten cooked.

Fried in a dry pan over high heat, to be precise, with a couple of pinches of salt.

As the worms cook they become translucent and, after a few minutes, we could literally see the fat bubbling underneath their skins. At this point the cook used the sharp edge of his spatula to break the skins and allow the liquid fat to escape into the pan.

After about fifteen minutes the larvae were transformed into the golden brown, shrunken specimens in the opening photograph, something much easier to contemplate putting in my mouth than the very worm-y worms they'd started out as.

And frankly, they were delicious. Crispy, salty, and greasy, with a lick of smoke - what's not to love? Our friend said they reminded him of chicharron; we wished for vinegar for dipping. After munching on several of the smallest larvae I went for a meatier specimen. More fat and some chewy 'meat' which, to me, evinced a pleasant bit of prawnish brine.

Most of the villagers declined to partake when we offered the plate around. Many wrinkled their noses in disgust (especially the ladies - sago worms are pulutan or 'drinking food'; they're also, as with so many other 'difficult' foods, said to be an aphrodisiac).

Would I seek them out again? No. Tasty as they were, they were far from the most delicious thing we ate during our time on Mindanao. But if a serving were laid in front of me I'd probably down a few, especially if I had an ice-cold San Miguel in one hand.

The Tree of Life (Part 2)

So, you've chopped down a fifteen-year-old sago palm, scraped out its insides, bathed them in water and kneaded and squeezed them dry, collected the starch from the bottom of your processing vessel, crammed it into waist-high cones you made from the base of the palm's leaves, left it to drain for a few days, and ended up with more sago flour than you'll ever eat in a year.

What to do with it?

If you're in Banza Barangay,Mindanao (Philippines), you might cook up some sago flatcakes called tumpi.

You'd begin by heating some sago flour - which is sometimes white and sometimes brick red and sometimes a shade in between - in a dry skillet so that later, when the tumpi are on the griddle, they don't get hard.

As the sago toasts it comes together in tough little clumps, so after emptying it from the pan you'd  break it up into small pieces.

Then you'd add freshly grated coconut and knead the two ingredients together with your hands, long and hard enough to thoroughly incorporate the coconut into the flour. (If you were in the mood, you might also knead in some mashed banana or sweet potato). You would add cane sugar, white or unrefined - enough, but not too much, because tumpi isn't as much a dessert sort of snack as it is a lightly sweet bit of nourishment.

You'd take balls of the sago-coconut-sugar mixture and pat them between your palms into flat cakes. (If you didn't want to be bothered with all that patting and pressing you'd skip this step entirely, and cook your sago-coconut-sugar mixture loose, for inisab.)

You'd put your sago pattycakes in a dry pan over a medium-high fire, and cook them on both sides until they're dark and a bit crisp,

and then you'd serve them to your visitors and chuckle at the way they rave over the crunchy-chewy texture of your everyday, no-big-deal creation.

Or, if you didn't mind expending a bit more energy you might try your hand at palagsing, mixing the grated meat of a coconut not as soft as buko (young coconut) nor as hard as the old coconut you grated for your tumpi with cane sugar, and then gradually adding in uncooked sago flour.

You'd spoon your palagsing 'dough' onto banana leaves, shaping it to form a log of sorts,

carefully wrap it side-to-side and tuck top and bottom edges under, and tightly tie two logs together, seam side in, to make water-tight seals.

You'd build a fire, bring a pot of water to the boil, and add the palagsing bundles.

After about thirty minutes you'd pull the palagsing from their bubbling bath and pull away their banana leaf cloaks to reveal tubes that, from a distance, resemble fat-marbled pork sausages.

You'd offer these, too, to your visitors, who would find them to be a fine combo of tender chewiness and - from the moist and super coconuty shredded fruit - crunch but who, residing in Malaysia (the home of gula Melaka) as they do, might think to themselves that as tasty as these palagsing are, the substitution of palm sugar for cane sugar would elevate them to a higher plane.

The Tree of Life (Part 1)

For years we've been eating sago - in the form of the pearls that float about in Taiwan bubble tea and the flour that lends a wonderful chew to various Southeast Asian sweet treats - without knowing exactly where it comes from.

Nor did we know that Mindanaoans owe their survival of Word War II, in large part, to lumbia, the local name for the sago palm. During the war sago flour, a highly absorbent carbohydrate source that expands in the belly to make one feel full, stood in for rice. This we learned from the residents of Barangay Banza (Butuan City), where last month we were gifted the opportunity to watch the processing of this ancient foodstuff from start to finish.

The sago palm grows wild near brackish water in much of coastal Southeast Asia; in some areas it's also cultivated. At the end of its fifteeen-year life cycle, right before it begins to flower, the tree is felled for the starch stored in its trunk.

Getting at the stuff is no easy task (using traditional methods, that is; these days much sago is industrially processed). The trunk is splt and its insides hacked out, bit by bit, by a blunt hoe-wielding strongman.

It takes a few hours of strenuous labor to shred the trunk to nothingness. As the 'shredder' works, trunk innards are transferred to a large container - in this case, a disused dugout canoe - and doused with water.

 

As he adds water to the sago palm shreds, the man responsible for processing the sago kneads them repeatedly to extract their starch. It turns the water the color of milky Thai iced tea.

After the sago shreds have been thorougly moistened and kneaded they're squeezed dry, handful by handful. The final squeeze takes place over a mesh-lined sieve suspended over the boat, and the spent shreds are discarded.

This gentleman was washing and kneading and squeezing when we arrived around 9am. He was still at it a few hours later. After years of making sago flour he knows by touch, he says, when all the starch has been squeezed from the sago shreds. When he's finished, a mound of fine white starch hides underwater, in the depths of the canoe.

Left aside for a day, the water evaporates. What little is left the next morning can easily be scooped, without disturbing the puddle of sago starch, out of the canoe with a shallow pan.

At this point the flour is scraped off of the bottom of the canoe. It comes up willingly, in big, flat slabs of snow-white velvet.

Though it feels dry when rubbed between the fingers, the sago flour hides moisture. Setting it aside in storage at this stage would result in much moldy flour and hours of wasted effort,

 

so the starch is further drained in ingenious and beautiful conical sieves made from the base of the leaf of the sago palm from whence it came.

The hole at the bottom of the cone is loosely blocked with a bit of discarded shredded sago palm trunk,

and then the flour, just scraped from the bottom of the canoe, is packed tight within.

A triangle of palm leaf, placed inside the cone with its point covering the very bottom,insures that the packed flour can effortlessly be dislodged from its sieve once it's completely dried.

 

The cones are then tied upright and the flour left to finish draining and drying for several days. When all is said and done each cone will hold about ten kilos of sago flour.

The resulting sago flour - or unau, as it's called in these parts - can be used immediately, or it can be transformed into kinabu, which is essentially toasted flour, via a few turns in a dry pan. Kinabu can be kept without spoiling for up to a year. It's used to make a number of cakes, and can also stretch a meal if added to cooked rice at a ratio of about 1 cup kinabu to 1 kilo rice.

Next up, sago nibbles.