Chili, a HOT commodity

The title of this post is not pun intended. In-deed, recently chili has become a HOT commodity in my country both literally and figuratively. Since the end of 2010, the price of chili has gone through the roof. Reaching an impressive IDR 100,000 (US $ 11.1) per kilogram, or five times its normal price and more than the price of chicken meat, it has truly become a hot commodity on dining table and in kitchens of most people in my country.



In less than one week, I already noticed more than 3 articles about this ‘hot commodity’ on headlines of Jakarta Post, one of the local newspapers. Both newspapers and social networking sites have been flooded with ironic messages and posts about chilies. Let me quote some interesting statements:


‘Asnidar is willing to sacrifice her family’s meat consumption in order to keep chili on the table. Chili is our staple food, not rice or meat, she said.’


‘Housewife Desi Octaviani said her family had replaced the hot flavor of chili with pepper’


‘The chili shortage hit lovers of fried snacks particularly hard. On a good day, fried snack vendors are generous in handing out fresh chilies as a complement. Now for 10 pieces of fried-snacks, the vendors only give 3 pieces of chili, tiny ones, told by office worker Rachmadin.’


‘Adisya said that the food at her favorite restaurants had dulled although it still contained chili. The taste is less spicy because they put more tomotoes in it.’


‘Rising chili prices have given us a chance to explore other Indonesian flavors, wrote Bondan Winarno, culinary expert.’


‘In Banyumas, Central Java, food traders tried their best to provide the usual menu at the same price. “We feel sorry for our customers because we cannot provide sambal (chili paste) for them,” Sumini said’.


People in Indonesia hardly go without eating fiery dishes during mealtimes. The hottest condiment known as ‘sambal’ or chili paste is a must-have accompaniment for every meal.

Life without sambal would be so plain for me and I think also for millions of other Indonesians. Imagine life for Koreans without kimchi, Americans without hamburger or Mexicans without tortillas. That is how it has felt for a large number of people in my country over the past few weeks.


Now let’s take a closer look at Indonesia’s treasure chest of Sambals:


Sambal is served as a condiment and as an ingredient for a variety of dishes. It is sometimes a substitute for fresh chilies. It can be extremely spicy for the uninitiated. It is common to find bowls of different sambals on the dining table in Indonesian homes.


Some popular Indonesian sambals include sambal terasi (shrimp paste sambal), sambal bajak, sambal mangga (green mango sambal), sambal ijo (green sambal), sambal balado, sambal kecap (sweet soy sauce sambal), sambal setan, sambal Taliwang, sambal matah and many more.


Sambal Terasi

A common Indonesian style of sambal. Terasi (shrimp paste) is similar to the Malaysian Belacan, but with a stronger flavor since terasi is a more condensed shrimp paste than belacan.


Sambal Bajak

Chili (or another kind of red pepper) fried with oil, garlic, terasi, candlenuts and other condiments


Sambal mangga

Freshly ground Sambal Terasi with shredded young mango; this is a good accompaniment to seafood.


Sambal ijo

A specialty of the Padang area from Indonesia, the sambal is green, made of green tomatoes, green chilli, and spices. The sambal is stir fried.


Sambal Balado

This is the Padang style of Sambal. Red chili pepper is blended together with garlic, shallot, tomato, salt and lemon or lime juice, then sauteed with oil.


Sambal Kecap Manis

Indonesian sweet soy sauce, chili, shallots and lime it has a chiefly sweet taste, as said by the Indonesian word ‘manis’ which means ‘sweet’.


Sambal Setan

A very hot sambal with Madame Jeanette peppers (red brownish, very sharp). The name literally means “Devil’s Sauce”.


Sambal Taliwang

This variant is native to Taliwang, a village near Mataram, Lombok Island, and is made from naga jolokia pepper grown specially in Lombok mixed with garlic and Lombok shrimp paste. It is served as condiments to ayam bakar Taliwang (Taliwang grilled chikcen)


Sambal matah

Raw Shallot & Lemongrass Sambal of Bali origin. It contains a lot of finely chopped shallots, chopped bird’s eye chilli, shrimp paste (terasi), with a dash of lemon.



There are still many other types of sambals ….. but for today, let me close this post by quoting Bondan Winarno, a culinary expert who asked people to look at the brighter side: ‘Rising chili prices have given us a chance to explore other Indonesian flavors. There are other hot flavors such as pepper, andaliman (szechuan peppercorn) and ginger’.


So perhaps it isn’t the end of the world after all for all lovers of chili in Indonesia.

Talking Tex-Mex

Driven by my cooking passion and my habit of trying out new recipes, one day I bought one more cooking book from the Periplus Mini Cookbooks. I was intrigue by its title ‘Tex-Mex’.

The book says that the phrase ‘Tex-Mex’ is not a trendy term coined by some food writer or a funny name of a Mexican restaurant – it is a geographical fact. Tex-Mex is the border between Mexico and Texas which separates two different countries but where food is concerned, the line blurs. Tex-Mex relies heavily on traditional Mexican, therefore often Spanish ingredients and recipes but there is also a strong American influence.

What I love about the recipes in Tex-Mex cooking book is because most of the recipes use chili and I am a chili lover. Over the pages I read some familiar dishes such as tacos, nachos and chili con carne which I have tried in Amigos, one famous Mexican restaurant in Jakarta. There are other recipes which are less familiar: Texan Beef Chili, Potato Skin with Chili Con Queso and Chicken Tamales and many more.

I decided to try out one of the less familiar recipes. I was attracted to the recipe of Texan Beef Chili. It has short ingredient list and relatively simple cooking method. The seasoning ingredients are onions, garlic, cumin and chili. Simple enough but wait a minute……..cumin? my family do not like the strong smell of cumin (in Bahasa we call jinten).

So now what? Should I skip this one and try out other recipe? Or should I just skip the cumin? Or should I cover the strong smell of cumin with other ingredient? But what ingredient?

When the cooking gets tough, the tough gets imaginative

Here comes my version of TEXAN BEEF CHILI

Ingredients
500 gram beef silver meat (instead of chuck steak)
5 tablespoons of all purpose seasoned flour to coat (the original recipe use plain flour)
100 gram button mushroom or 1 red bell pepper (capsicum), cut into small pieces
5 table spoons of Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
½ onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed & chopped
1 teaspoon Five Spice powder (as substitute of ground cumin)
3 teaspoons of chili powder
2 teaspoons of beef stock powder diluted in 100 ml water (as an alternative to liquid beef stock)

In the original recipe, the ingredients do not include button mushroom and/or red pepper. I add button mushroom  to the recipe to give more volume while the red pepper can give more color to the dish.

Method
Cut the meat into small cubes
Toss in the seasoned flour until coated, then shake off the excess.
Heat the oil in a large heavy-based pan
Cook the meat in batches over medium heat until brown and remove from the pan.
Put the chopped onion in the pan and cook until soft and golden
Add the garlic and chili powder, cook and stirring continuously for around 1 minutes
Put in the button mushroom and/or red pepper, stir occasionally until mix well with the seasonings
Return the meat to the pan
Add the Five Spice powder
Add the beef stock and stirring frequently to scrape up the spices from the bottom of the pan
Reduce the heat to very low and continue to cook until the meat is tender and the sauce is thick
Serve with white rice

My improvised Texan Beef Chili worked!

The substitution from plain flour to all purpose seasoned flour makes the beef more tasty and Five Spice powder seems to be a perfect ingredient to substitute the cumin.

My family love it.  Tanti, one of my colleagues in the office has been begging me to share the recipe (I told her that it’s a secret recipe).

Well, here is the recipe my friend. Now you may try it, it’s no longer secret recipe.

Notes and Tips
For the seasoned flour I use one of the so many brands of all purpose seasoned flour available in the market. But we can also use plain flour seasoned with salt and pepper.
When I ran out of button mushroom, I used red bell pepper cut into small cubes and it worked well too.

Pasta Experimenta

As the famous saying goes Many roads lead to Rome – this is true for cooking. My mom had a natural gift in the kitchen and she never used recipes from books. She memorized some recipes inherited from her mom and invented some of her own while I learned cooking by following recipes from books or other sources.

When I started cooking, I did not dare to improvise. I simply followed a recipe to the letter, no substitutions no improvements. I started with my mom’s old recipe of chicken barbeque coz it was familiar, has simple list of ingredients and easy cooking method. And it worked! This first success story encouraged me to be more experimental.

In the mean time I keep doing my desk research. It's not just on cooking but also on the details of the ingredients, methods, cooking tips from different references plus my private cooking course with famous Chefs on TV.

After watching one of Rachel Ray’s 30 Minutes cooking on TV, I was inspired to try cooking pasta. I bought one of Periplus Mini Cookbooks named Classic Essential Pasta. From this book plus the results of my research, I learned some important Pasta Secrets.

There are a huge number of pasta varieties and shapes, and each has a specific type of sauce as its partner. Pasta may be dried or fresh, and dried pasta made in Italy is considered to be the best. Spaghetti and macaroni are perhaps the most widely available pasta shapes but there are hundreds of others including numerous flat sheets, noodles and small shapes. Most shapes can be obtained in a variety of sizes and many are sold with both smooth and ribbed surfaces. Common sense will tell you that some shapes are suited to particular purposes. To make a dish which pasta is layered with a sauce, large flat shapes such as lasagna are an obvious choice. However, even when recipes associate particular shapes with certain sauces, it is still up to you whether or not to follow the convention.

My Pasta Experimenta

To start my pasta experiment, I follow recipes in Classic Essential Pasta as my guide. Spaghetti Bolognese was my first trial. Looking at the list of the ingredients for the sauce (parsley, olive oil, garlic, onion, carrot, celery stick, mince beef, beef stock, red wines, canned crushed tomatoes, sugar, and parmesan cheese), I realized that this time I could not follow the recipe to the letter. My family do not like carrots, celery stick and parsley so I skipped them. I did not have canned tomatoes in stock so I used fresh ones. I started to improvise the recipes. I believe that recipes are only a guide, a skeletal framework to be fleshed out according to your nature and desire.

After some trials with different versions of Spaghetti Bolognese, I must confess that as Queen of Convenience, I ended up using the ready-to-use spaghetti sauce which sold in a glass jar. There are many brands of spaghetti sauce in the market and I had to try several different brands to come to a conclusion which brand gives the best mix to my spaghetti Bolognese customized recipe.

One day I went to a café with my youngest daughter and we saw an intriguing dish on the Menu: Spaghetti Tuna Cabe Rawit literally means Spaghetti Tuna Bird’s Eye Chili. This must be a fusion type of spaghetti. As chili lovers, we definitely loved to try this so we ordered. It turned out to be a delicious spaghetti for our Indonesian taste-bud. I ate the spaghetti slowly trying to identify what ingredients they used. Of course there were tuna and chili but I also could feel the taste of button mushroom, garlic, salt & pepper.

The next day, I tried out the Spaghetti Tuna using my own imagination recipe. It turned out to be more delicious than the one I ate in the café. My daughter confirmed this too and the secret was because it was cooked with LOVE . I name this recipe Spaghetti Tuna Hot Fusion.

SPAGHETTI TUNA HOT FUSION

Ingredients
3 cloves of garlic, peeled & chopped
3 bird’s eye chilies (the red ones)
100 gram button mushroom, sliced finely including the stem
100 gram of canned tuna flakes in water, drained the water
1-2 teaspoon lime juice
Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
250 gram dried spaghetti
Pinch of salt and pepper
Coriander leaves and grated parmesan cheese

Method
To cook perfect pasta, I follow the Secret of Cooking Pasta which I learned from the book Classic & Essential Pasta by Periplus Mini Cookbooks as follows:

Put the spaghetti in a very large pot.
Allow at least 2 liters of water for every 250gram of spaghetti – this gives plenty of room for the pasta to move and expand and prevents the pasta clumping together. Bring the water to a rapid boil (cover the pot with a lid to make it come to a boil faster) then add the spaghetti.
Some people like to add a little oil to the pot, but plenty of water will prevent the pasta sticking.
Add salt if you like.
Give it a quick stir to distribute it evenly through the water and bring back to the boil.
You can use the times given on the pack as a guide but the only way to really know if the pasta is ready is to taste it. Lift a small piece of spaghetti from the pot, cool it slightly, then bite. The spaghetti should be just tender, with no raw taste but certainly not soft and gluggy. This is known as ‘al dente’ the correct way to serve pasta.
Then drain the cooked spaghetti in a colander.

Carefully wipe the mushroom with a damp paper towel to remove any grit. Slice the whole mushroom finely including the stem
Heat the EVOO in a heavy-based frying pan.
Cook the garlic and chilies over medium heat, stirring occasionally until it is fragrant
Add the tuna flakes which have been drained from the water, then add the mushroom and stir occasionally for about 6 minutes
Add the lime juice to the pan
Add the cooked spaghetti and stir to mix well with the other ingredients for about 5 minutes
Season to taste with salt and pepper

Serve immediately in warm pasta serving dish and garnish with fresh coriander leaves and parmesan cheese (if liked).