Indonesian Cooking Class at Warung Enak, in Ubud, Bali

If you haven’t guessed it by now, one of our goals this year is to learn how to cook the cuisine of the countries we visit.  We were intrigued by the menu presented by Warung Enak because it included dishes from across the Indonesian archipelago.

Here’s what our menu included:

• Snack: Buntil Ayam, from Sumatra
  • Sticky rice stuffed with minced, chicken, ginger, and garlic, mixed with coconut milk, wrapped in pumpkin leaf
• Appetizer: Otak-Otak Tenggiri, from Kalimantan (Borneo)
  • Minced white mackerel, wrapped in a banana leaf and grilled
• Soup: Garang Asam, from Bali
  • Spicy seafood soup, in a lemongrass, chili, ginger, blue galangal, and turmeric broth
• Main Course:
  • Pangek Sapi, from Sumatra
    • Spicy beef stew with basil, wing beans, and steamed rice
  • Bergedel Jagung, from central Java
    • Corn fritters served with urub sayur
• Dessert:
  • Kue Lumpur, from Kalimantan
    • Mini pancakes with young coconut and raisins, served with vanilla and chocolate sauce
  • Pisang Rai, from Bali
    • Boiled banana beignet

Yeah yeah, I know what you’re thinking.  Holy crap.  That’s awesome.  When do you come over and cook for us?   Not so fast, boys and girls…  we haven’t even gotten to the photos yet!

The class started off with a trip to the local morning market which is where locals get their fresh produce.  Our instructor showed us the veggies we’d be using, many of which we didn’t recognize.   We’d learn later that there are substitutes for them if we can find them wherever we are.

Then, we returned to the restaurant for our cooking class, which we think until now, is the best cooking class we’ve ever taken.  Bold statement… why?  We cooked in the restaurant’s kitchen as if we were one of the staff, we prepared dishes that were served in the restaurant, we got 1:1 instruction from the lead sous chef, and the food we made tasted amazing.

It was less a class, and more like being a sous chef for a day – you felt the heat of the kitchen from the stove, grill, oven, and high heat wok station; you came to understand how tiring it was to stand up prepping and cooking for several hours; and you gained an appreciation for how much work it takes to put a dish together.  We even had the ingredients pre-prepared for us and it was still a good amount of work!

One of our favorite dishes was the spicy seafood soup.  Look at all of the ingredients:

The final product:

Here are the corn fritters:

And, here’s our favorite, the spicy beef stew served over rice and with blanched wing beans.   This one’s a keeper, and probably the first dish we’ll try to make when we have a proper kitchen.

Finally, what class would be complete without a certificate…

And now, we’re certified!  … or something.   So, when do you get to try some of this cooking?   If we can find the ingredients, and you have a proper kitchen and are willing to eat version 1.0 of our cooking, maybe we can work something out!

Check out the whole set of photos in the slideshow below:

[flickrslideshow acct_name=”tony-chen” id=”72157624939931909″]