What is your favourite street food? Part 8

Street food Indonesia

• Gorengan (frites)

• Martabak: There are 2 types of Martabak, sweet and savoury. For the sweet one, you can choose so many different kinds of toppings like peanuts, cheese, chocolate, blueberry, strawberry, etc. So basically it is like a pancake but in a bigger size.

For a savoury one, it is more like an omelette with bits of vegetables and minced meat.

• Sate Padang: This food is originally from Padang, West Sumatra. It is grilled meat (kebab) with spicy sauce. If you love spicy food, you should try this.

• Mie Ayam (Chicken Noodles)

• Bakso (Meatball)

• Soto: traditional Indonesian yellow soup mainly composed of broth, meat and vegetables with various spices. You can eat it with rice, or glass noodle (bihun).

• Siomay: Steamed fish dumpling with vegetables served in peanut sauce.

• Es Cendol: a dark-green pulpy dish of rice (or sago) flour worms with coconut milk and syrup of areca sugar. It used to be served without ice.

Cendol is a traditional dessert popular in Southeast Asia such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma.as a sweet snack/beverages made from rice flour and other ingredients that are formed by filters, then mixed with palm sugar and coconut milk (for beverage).

Satay

Satay or most people would call sate is by far the most popular street food. It is basically marinated chicken meat with spices, barbecued and mixed with sauces and lontong which is similar to rice cakes. You could find lots of variations and personally, the best would be sate Padang.

Pisang Goreng

This is probably the simplest street food, but it has one of the best pleasing taste compared to the rest. These are thinly sliced unripe bananas dipped in a batter and deep fried. It is then topped off with the chocolate chip/cheese + condensed milk. It’s crisp on the outside with sweet mushy bananas on the inside, the sweet toppings compliments and goes well with it.

Risol

Personally, this is my favourite street food, what makes it more interesting is that the filling could vary from crisp bihun (thin noodles) to ham, cheese, eggs and mayo. It is wrapped in a thin pastry-like wrapping and is deep fried. It’s very crisp on the outside and the savoury filling just oozes to your tongue with juicy ham slices.

Bakwan

This street-food doesn’t pale in terms of taste compared to others, but it’s quite unhealthy. It’s basically flour batter mixed with veggies (mostly corn, cabbage, carrot and onion) and is deep fried. Flavor-wise, it’s chewy and gets crispy when chewing on the crisp veggies. It has a common taste with Korean pancake, except that it has a tint of Indonesian savoury spices, although can be quite oily at times.

Tapai

Tapai is also a popular street food/ snack. It is steamed fermented cassava topped with shredded cheese or chocolate chips at times. It is easily chewed and flavour-wise is a mixture of sweet and alcohol-ish. It has that semi alcohol taste as a result of fermentation and it it’s great with the sweet toppings that compliment it.

I can’t mention all because there are too many street foods here. These are foods which you can find in most cities in Indonesia. So if you visit Indonesia, don’t forget to try all these foods.

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