Eating My Way Through Indonesia: 13 Dishes That Made the Trip

“Something spicy.”

I was still fairly early into my trip, in Ubud on one of those tourist day tours, when I realised Indonesia hadn't really delivered on one of my expectations. I'd come expecting chilli. Proper chilli. Yet somehow, despite being in Indonesia, I hadn't eaten anything particularly spicy.

So when the guy asked what I wanted, I told him exactly that. Something spicy.

He gave me tangkleng kambing.

It was a rocket.

My lips were burning, sweat was pouring off me and I was mixing more and more rice into the broth in an attempt to calm it down. I'd specifically asked for this, of course, so there wasn't much room to complain. Indonesia had delivered exactly what I'd requested.

At the time, I knew very little about what I was eating beyond the obvious fact that it involved goat. I learnt afterwards that tangkleng, also commonly written tengkleng, is associated with Solo, or Surakarta, in Central Java. Traditionally, it makes use of parts of the goat such as bones, ribs and offal, simmered in a thin, heavily spiced broth.

None of this was going through my head while I was eating it. I was mainly concentrating on my burning lips.

But that bowl became the beginning of something that followed me around Indonesia. I'd arrived wanting to try Indonesian food. I hadn't realised quite how much of the country I would end up experiencing through it.

Eleven Years Waiting for Fried Rice

Some of the food I'd come looking for had been on my radar long before I'd booked a flight to Indonesia.

At university, around 2015, I had a friend who loved food as much as I did. We'd cook together and talk about what we'd eaten, and he was always telling me how good Indonesian food was. That was probably the first time nasi goreng properly entered my head.

Eleven years later, I was finally eating it in Indonesia.

Nasi goreng is one of those dishes that doesn't need much selling to me. Fried rice, kecap manis, chilli, garlic, shallots, egg and whatever meat or vegetables happen to be going into that particular version. More importantly, Indonesia appears to have decided that fried rice is perfectly acceptable for breakfast, lunch or dinner, which is a position I wholeheartedly support.

Rendang had followed me there through friends as well. A mate from work was travelling around Indonesia separately and messaged me telling me to try it because it was good.

So I did. Several times.

I couldn't now tell you exactly where I ate each one. That's the reality of travelling for five weeks. Not every meal becomes a significant travel memory simply because you're abroad. Sometimes someone messages you saying, “Try this, it's good,” you eat it, they're right, and two weeks later you couldn't tell anyone which restaurant you were sitting in.

The meals I remember properly tend to be the ones where something else happened.

Pointing at Dinner

Canggu gave me one of those meals.

I walked into a busy buffet-style warung filled with a mixture of Indonesians and tourists. In front of me were trays of food, most of which I couldn't name, and I started pointing at things that looked good.

There was some logic to it. I like spicy food, so I'd pick something that looked particularly dangerous and then something else that appeared capable of balancing it out enough that I wouldn't blow my head — or my back doors — off.

The woman serving me didn't speak English and looked increasingly confused by my pointing. Occasionally I appeared to receive something other than what I thought I'd indicated, although considering I didn't know what either thing was called, there wasn't much point attempting to correct her.

Eventually I got pretty much all the English I actually needed.

“Rice, white or yellow?”

Yellow.

“One or two?”

And that was how I ended up with one of my favourite mixed plates of the trip.

I worked out what I'd eaten properly afterwards. The yellow rice was nasi kuning, coloured with turmeric and cooked with coconut milk and aromatics. Around it I'd accumulated babi goreng, crispy fried pork; telur bumbu, an egg covered in spices; bakwan jagung, sweetcorn fritters; and tumis kacang panjang, long beans which, in my case, came with chilli, egg and little prawns.

I hadn't walked into the warung intending to tick five Indonesian dishes off a list. I hadn't even known what most of them were. I'd pointed at things that looked nice and hoped for the best.

That became one of my favourite ways to eat in Indonesia.

Pork Scratchings, Except Bali

There was one Balinese dish I had been specifically instructed not to miss.

Before I left Britain, a friend told me I needed to try babi guling. Then I landed in Indonesia and he messaged me again to make sure I hadn't forgotten.

I hadn't.

I asked ChatGPT where to find a decent one in Canggu and went from there. There was no romantic discovery down an unmarked alleyway and no ancient culinary instinct guiding me towards it. My mate nagged me and an AI told me where to go.

Babi guling is one of Bali's best-known pork dishes: pig seasoned with a mixture of Balinese spices and traditionally roasted, giving you tender meat alongside the part I was most interested in — the crispy skin. Pork also occupies a different place in Balinese cooking than it does across much of Muslim-majority Indonesia, reflecting Bali's predominantly Hindu culture.

There were plenty of unfamiliar flavours on the plate, but the thing I liked most immediately reminded me of home.

Pork scratchings.

For all the distance I'd travelled and all the Balinese spices involved, crispy pig skin was still crispy pig skin. I grew up eating pork scratchings in pubs and still think there's something particularly satisfying about finishing a hike, ordering a pint and opening a bag.

Apparently several thousand miles wasn't enough to change that.

I Fell in Love With Sambal

Then there was sambal.

This happened quickly.

Someone brought some out with one of my meals early in the trip and that was pretty much it. I already liked spicy food, but this wasn't like squeezing Sriracha over something at home. I liked seeing the chilli seeds in it, and the texture sat somewhere between a paste and a sauce: rough enough to feel like actual chopped ingredients but loose enough to spoon over everything.

So I did.

Sambal isn't one recipe but a huge family of chilli preparations that change across Indonesia. In Bali, one of my favourites was sambal matah, with raw shallots, chilli and lemongrass giving it a fresher taste than the cooked chilli sambals I'd also been eating.

At some point it stopped being an interesting condiment that arrived beside my food and became something I expected to be there.

I'm back in Britain now.

I already miss it.

Seeing Gili T for the First Time

Gili Trawangan was where I temporarily failed at my own plan.

I'd gone to Indonesia wanting to eat Indonesian food, then arrived on Gili T, started hanging around with other travellers and ate far too much Western food. You're staying in hostels, somebody wants a burger, someone else wants pizza and suddenly you've travelled halfway around the world to eat something you could have ordered at home.

Then a German girl checked into my dorm and mentioned that she wanted prawns.

“Do you want to go to a warung?”

We got on my motorbike and headed towards a market near the mosque around sunset.

There were fish laid out over ice and I chose mine. The bloke told me it had been caught that morning.

I believed him.

They grilled it over charcoal and served it with rice and sambal. She got her prawns cooked the same way. We sat there eating while the sun went down and the call to prayer came from the mosque.

We were the only Westerners there.

I don't want to pretend we'd discovered the “real” Gili T because we'd managed to leave the backpacker restaurants for an evening. The bars, hostels, dive shops and Western restaurants are part of Gili T too, and I'd spent plenty of time enjoying them.

But sitting there, I felt as though I was seeing the island for the first time.

So many of my interactions until then had been connected in some way to tourism: somewhere designed for us to sleep, somewhere designed for us to drink, somewhere selling us an experience. At the market, nobody seemed particularly interested in making Gili T comfortable for visitors. People were simply eating, working, talking and getting on with living on an island that also happened to be full of us.

That fish became one of several ikan bakar I ate during the trip. Whenever I saw grilled fish, I tended to order it. Sometimes that meant choosing the fish myself from whatever was sitting over ice, then waiting while it was cooked over charcoal.

Fish, charcoal, rice and sambal.

It didn't need much else.

Curry Isn't Always Curry

After the market, I kept looking for more local food on Gili T and ended up at Pawon Gili.

I think they'd only just opened because I was the only customer.

I ordered gulai ikan, a fish curry, and what surprised me when it arrived was how thin it was. Growing up in Britain, and having travelled around India, I had a fairly fixed idea of what something translated into English as “curry” was supposed to look like.

This wasn't it.

It was much closer to a broth.

Then I realised I'd already encountered something similar with the tangkleng in Ubud. Maybe there wasn't anything unusual about the curry. Maybe my definition of curry was the problem.

I poured it over the rice and ate the lot.

Indonesia Eventually Won the Chilli Argument

By the time I reached Sumatra, the bloke who'd arrived in Ubud complaining that Indonesia hadn't fed him anything spicy enough had changed his tune.

Unfortunately, I wasn't in particularly good shape for what came next.

I'd spent part of my time in Kuta, Lombok, fighting off food poisoning and what may have been COVID. Not long afterwards, I headed into the jungle near Bukit Lawang looking for orangutans and discovered that I'd seriously underestimated the trek.

I was with my guide BamBam and Agus, alongside a Dutch mother and daughter and an English girl. Agus couldn't really speak English and I couldn't speak Indonesian.

It didn't seem to matter.

We laughed all day.

Quite a lot of it was at me. I was sweating ridiculous amounts, I asked whether I could eat the ants, and I kept posing for stupid photographs. Being ginger, I also explained that the orangutans were my cousins and I'd travelled to Sumatra for a family holiday.

Somehow, without much shared language, Agus and I got on brilliantly.

The trek ended up being around 10 kilometres through the jungle and was considerably harder than I'd expected, particularly coming off the back of being ill.

What stayed with me afterwards, though, was Agus.

His father had suffered a stroke the previous year. I'd seen him that morning when we'd had breakfast at about nine. Agus had then spent the day walking through the jungle with us, guiding, helping and laughing, and when the trek was finished he walked home to look after his dad.

I thought he was a legend.

I was exhausted and starving.

We sat on the ground outside the shack where we were staying while food appeared around us. Among it was an anchovy dish absolutely loaded with chilli.

It was the hottest thing I ate in Indonesia.

It was also my favourite.

Every sensible part of me should probably have stopped eating it. Instead, I kept loading more onto my plate while everyone around me encouraged me to have more.

So I did.

The little anchovies are known as teri, and chilli-heavy preparations of them are particularly associated with parts of Sumatra. I didn't know any of that while sitting on the ground outside the shack. I just knew that my mouth was on fire and, for some reason, I desperately wanted another spoonful.

And because apparently that day wasn't strange enough, I bumped into a German bloke I'd met while travelling around the Baltics in 2024.

In the Sumatran jungle.

Two years later.

The following day I bumped into him again in town and we had a beer. He told me he'd been bitten by a rat.

Of course he had.

INTERNAL LINK — Three Capitals, One Railway: the Baltic trip where I first met the German traveller

More Than Nasi Goreng

Before travelling around Indonesia, I thought eating local food would mostly mean working my way through dishes I'd heard about beforehand.

Nasi goreng. Rendang. Babi guling. Grilled fish. Lots of chilli.

I ate all of those, but they're not really how I remember the food anymore.

I remember the woman in Canggu looking increasingly confused while I pointed badly at trays behind the counter. I remember sitting at shared tables in warungs and telling Indonesians how much I loved their food, and the reaction that would get.

“Try this.”

“Go here.”

One recommendation would lead to another.

I remember choosing a fish off some ice because a German girl I'd known for about five minutes fancied prawns, then sitting beside a mosque at sunset and realising there was an entire Gili T carrying on around the tourist industry I'd barely noticed.

I remember Agus laughing at how much I was sweating despite us barely being able to speak to each other, then walking home after ten kilometres in the jungle to look after his father.

Food wasn't just one of the things I experienced in Indonesia. It repeatedly gave me an excuse to interact with people I otherwise might never have spoken to.

I could spend an hour online watching a bikini influencer explain where to get the best matcha latte in Canggu.

Or I could walk into a warung, point at something I couldn't identify and share a table with somebody who actually lived there.

I know which one taught me more about Indonesia.

Even if half the time I didn't know what I'd ordered.