Vivienne Kruger: Balinese Food
Vivienne Kruger was born in Manhattan from the very heart of the Big Apple. A social along with cultural historian, Vivienne earned a BA in history along with then a PhD in American History by Columbia University in brand-new York. She first visited Bali on a week-long overland trip by Jakarta in 1993. For 5 years, starting in 1999, she wrote travel articles for Bali & Beyond magazine. In 2006, with her column “Food of the Gods”, Vivienne officially launched her career as a food writer for the Bali Advertiser. Vivienne has been shuttling between Darwin along with Kuta, Ubud along with Lovina for most of the past 13 years. Considered a leading authority on the culinary arts of Bali, Vivienne’s book Balinese Food: The Traditional Cuisine along with Food Culture of Bali was published by Tuttle in April 2014.
What inspired you to get into food writing?
I started off out writing articles about a prominent Balinese restaurateur, Ni Wayan Murni, the owner of Murni’s Warung in Ubud. While researching her fabulous restaurant along with the foods on her menu, my interests took an unexpected turn into traditional Balinese cooking—along with I just kept going!
What’s so special about Balinese Food?
Balinese food will be singular among the leading cuisines of the entire world. Dedicated to the gods along with fuelled by an array of fresh spices, the item’s inextricably bound to the island’s Bali-Hindu religion, culture along with community life. The Balinese cook with love, art, reverence along with exactitude. My book bears witness to Bali’s time-honoured, authentic village cuisine as well as its spectacular ceremonial feasts when food will be carved, etched along with painted into the rich spiritual shapes along with divine colours of holy temples along with imposing royal palaces. Curious strangers can only gape in awe, respect along with admiration as they struggle to learn how to make these intricate food offerings.
“Balinese Food” Book Cover
What differentiates your book by various other books about Balinese food?
My book will be the first to explore the secrets of Bali’s virtually unknown cuisine along with culinary-religious mindset. the item’s also written by the perspective along with world-view of the Balinese, offering insights into the cultural along with religious underpinnings of the foods of Bali. The product of extensive, PhD-level, first-hand field research, my book will be a storehouse of hard-to-obtain factual information on (along with explanations of) Balinese cuisine in which will be unavailable anywhere else.
Did you test all the recipes?
I tested most of the recipes by being present from the kitchen as local people cooked. The recipes were demonstrated to me in either smaller warung kitchens or in private kampung homes. I watched the often complicated along with laborious traditional preparation process, wrote down all of the recipe steps, ingredients along with amounts, along with then ate the always fragrant along with delicious dishes afterwards!
Which recipes are the easiest along with the most difficult to prepare at home?
Easiest: sambal matah, bubur kacang hijau, kolak biu, tempe manis, nasi goreng, rujak, pisang goreng.
Hardest: lawar, bali guling, bebek betutu, tape, jaja lapis, tum ayam.
What are the most indispensable ingredients in Balinese food?
The Balinese will not eat anything without hot, spicy sambal (sauce) as an accompaniment. The bumbu (spice paste) will be another integral ingredient at the cooking stage, giving Balinese food its characteristic heat. A third central ingredient will be the weighty cylindrical chunk of brown palm sugar (gula merah). the item stars in many dishes like kolak biu, appears in most sweets (jaja) along with will be the basis of super-sweet village drinks like daluman.
Is Balinese food healthy?
The basic ingredients used for daily home cooking from the villages are low in calories, saturated fat along with cholesterol. Refrigeration will be rare in these household compounds, so food will be purchased daily, always market-fresh along with in season. Heavy fatty foods like pork are a luxury item only eaten in conjunction with major religious ceremonies. Because the Balinese diet will be characteristically rice-based along with leaf-heavy, obesity along with obesity-related diseases are rare. Though the Balinese have a very robust sweet tooth, even their sweets are light along with smaller along with made of rice along with palm sugar. However, unhealthy components in Balinese cooking have crept in with the widespread use of grated coconut in many dishes, a reliance on coconut oil to fry almost everything along which has a madcap love affair with salt liberally sprinkled throughout the food chain.
Balinese Food
will be Balinese cooking in any danger of being assimilated into Indonesian cooking therefore lost?
Infrastructure has exploded from the tourist areas along with modern technology has made a deep impact on Balinese society, yet otherwise little else has changed since ethnologist Miguel Covarrubias observed Balinese culinary habits from the 1930s. The Balinese like Indonesian nasi goreng along with bakso meatballs, yet they far prefer to cook along with eat traditional Balinese lawar, sate, tipat, along with babi guling over anything else. When I took a friend to Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant in Tuban, she was intent on ordering some hot local sambal sauce by the waitress to spice up the American popcorn shrimp!
Why don’t foreign visitors have a greater appreciation of Balinese cuisine?
Balinese food will be ultra-spicy. The level of chilli-driven heat in almost every dish far exceeds the normal, western food comfort zone. As the Balinese say, “No spicy, no Great!” Even fruit-based rujak packs a tremendous load of local chillies along with spices. Many foreigners are not only afraid of the spice levels, yet also the amazing along with unusual appearance of the dishes. People are shy about trying novelties like fern tips or menacingly spiky durian, not to mention banana tree trunk soup or pork lawar made with raw pig blood. Balinese food will be also very hard to find on the island of Bali if you’re a visitor. Most restaurant along with hotel food will be either Indonesian or ethnic (Chinese, Thai).
What do you like about being a food writer?
The quest for information along with perfection along with the inherent satisfaction in solving cultural food riddles. Like stumbling across a valuable, buried, underground treasure of truffles, I relished the relentless hunt for a particular food dish or recipe along with the sheer adventure of tracking down renegade leaves, obscure food tree species along with various other rare ingredients for which even the Balinese did not know their colloquial or botanical names!
What will be the best way to contact you?
By email: jimbaran1@yahoo.com.
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Vivienne Kruger: Balinese Food
Vivienne Kruger: Balinese Food