Travel report

Surprising discoveries

Due to the colonial history, we as people from the Netherlands already know the Indonesian cuisine very well. Bami Goreng and Nasi Goreng are long since known and therefore our demands were very high. Those recipes had to be tastier than ever! And they, Erni and Nita, nevertheless succeeded in totally surprising us! Nita’s spice paste became completely green instead of the usual brown, due to the crushed kaffir lime leaf. But it smelled good and tasted even better!

During a relaxing weekend at the beach a ginger-honey wok dish, a main course on the menu at the snack bar of Suyani, became our favourite dish. We told the owner about our project to bring pure products from Asia to Europe and she was so enthusiastic that she wanted to participate. Her recipe is therefore now produced in Indonesia for MeiAsia!

Thanks to our very sympathetic guide Prayudhi, his wife and Evi, a friend of the family, we met many more Indonesian cooking talents, including Alif, the ‘Jamie Oliver’ from Indonesia (qua looks and qua cookery).

Nevertheless, we still missed one typical Indonesian product: Ketjap Manis, Indonesian sweet soy sauce. We didn’t consider it as necessary to bring an extra variant to the European market, until we smelled at the magnificent ruins of a side complex of the Prambanan temple a wonderful sweet odour. Yohanes was cooking baked rice with Ketjap there. It smelled so overwhelmingly delicious that we directly exchanged a confident look: we had found our pure variant Ketjap Manis!

Satisfied, we packed our bags once again, this time for Singapore!