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It is truly a genius of a creation. I’m going to take my first bite. Wow, that rice, it’s like a combination of a rice and omelet. What’s up everyone, it’s Mark Wiens with migrationology.com in Jakarta, Indonesia.
It is mid morning and Ying and I are walking over to Glodok, which is Jakarta’s Chinatown. And actually, we don’t really have any plans of what we’re gonna do there, not really, but we’re just gonna walk around, explore, probably find some street food.
There’s a lot of traffic, as usual, on this road, so that’s why we are walking. We’re going to beat the traffic and we’re gonna explore Jakarta’s Chinatown.
We took the back way to get to Chinatown, through the back streets, but we are definitely in Chinatown now. The whole, it’s still Jakarta, but you can definitely feel that it’s Chinatown.
We passed a couple of Chinese temples already, and you can see some of the old Chinese buildings that are evidence that we are in Chinatown, as well as, I think we’re gonna walk through a market soon, I’ve seen some people carrying lots of bags.
And also, in Chinatown, they also have bicycle rickshaws which are available for transportation. We have gotten to the market section of Glodok. There is a lot of beautiful looking fruits and vegetables.
And actually, this Chinatown kinda reminds me of Bangkok’s Chinatown, Yaowarat, very, a lot of similarities. And it’s a very tight, and busy place. A lot of business and commerce and markets everywhere you look.
We just took a turn down a side alley, this is just a walking alley, and we are in route to a famous coffee shop. I think it’s somewhere down here and maybe to the right.
The market street is a really great atmosphere, but then when you get down on these even side alleys, it’s really quiet back here and really nice.
A lot of people are very friendly, and there are lots of random things for sale. Just look at this quantity of avocados. We’re just walking through the alley, we haven’t made it to the coffee shop yet, but I saw a guy selling siomay from his motorbike.
He had a variety of different things in his steamer, and we kind of just chose a number of different things. I think these are the actual siomay and then there’s some tofu and then he also had one with bitter melon.
I think pork stuffed into bitter melon so I got one of those. And then this is definitely a Chinese style of a dish, but what really makes it Indonesian is that they serve it with peanut sauce.
So, after he finished slicing them all up, he put a big scoop of peanut sauce and then he squeezed on some kecap manis which is sweet soy sauce. And I think that’s kind of a chili sauce on the side there.
So, I’m gonna try one of these first. Dip it into the peanut sauce. Wow, that has a very squishy kind of texture. Almost like mochi glutinous rice texture to it.
And then at the tail end of my bite, then I can taste some sesame oil and maybe a little bit of minced pork. That’s just a straight up piece of tofu with the sweet peanut sauce and a little bit of chili in there as well. I really love bitter melon, it has such a wonderful bitter flavor.
And then it’s juicy and has a, like a cucumber crispness to it. (inaudible) As I was eating that plate of siomay I was standing right across the street from a vegetarian restaurant and the owner here is really nice and he invited us to try some of his all vegetarian Indonesian food.
And what I really want to taste, I think I’m just going to get a small taste, because we might have a lot of, So, he has a whole spread of different Indonesian dishes all vegetarian and the one that I really want to taste is rendang which is one of the most famous Indonesian dishes and it happens to be a favorite of mine, as well, but I have never had a vegetarian version of it.
I didn’t want to order a whole plate of food with rice because I think we still have a lot to eat, so I just got some of the rendang to taste it. This is the rendang vegetarian. What is in the rendang? – Mushroom, we make it out of mushroom, black mushroom.
I could have a mistaken it for chunks of meat definitely. Even on the inside it looks kind of like meat. That looks like a big meatball.
That’s really good, oh wow. It’s like meat but it’s more tender. It almost tastes like pulled beef, but that is all mushroom.
That rendang is delicious actually. It’s a little bit spicy, you can taste the coconut, and these are some kind of spring roll types of things and he said it might taste a little bit like shrimp.
I think that’s bean curd. That’s awesome. That is my kind of vegetarian bite right there, just solid mushrooms, it’s like compressed mushrooms. That was impressively good, especially that rendang.
And, so, if you’re looking for all vegetarian food in Jakarta in Chinatown, it’s right in this lane. And I’m not sure the name of this lane, but that was really good vegetarian food. We finally made it to the famous, legendary coffee shop.
This place is called Kopi Es Tak Kie. It is an old school Chinese Indonesian coffee shop. And it has a lot of history to it, if you look around you can see a lot of photos on the wall and a lot of famous people, I believe, have come here for coffee.
It’s really humid and I decided it would be a good idea to order a hot coffee. Oh, that is a good black cup of coffee. The coffee is so smooth. And I get it sugarless, so it’s just straight up black coffee, but really smooth. It doesn’t have much acid, and just a good, clean chocolatey flavor.
And this an indoor coffee shop and they have a number of different street food stalls that set up right outside the door of this shop, and so you can order street food and then they will deliver it inside so you can sit down at the table as long as you’re ordering drinks and eat the street food from outside.
And one of the options right outside the door is Nasi campur and Nasi campur is actually just means rice and mixed everything.
There’s some crispy pork belly, I think that’s gizzard. This is like boiled chicken. There’s a tiny sliver of an egg.
I think this is the char siu, the roast pork, the roasted barbecue pork. That’s a lot more flavorful than it looked. That rice is really good. And then that pork is very lean and it’s actually quite tender.
But I think it would be improved with some of this chili sauce, let me add that over here. And that’s a little piece of pork belly. And I think that is gizzard, looks like gizzard. That’s like a sour, salty chili sauce.
And then that’s definitely gizzard, it has a very crisp texture to it.and then actually I don’t think that was pork belly, I think it might have been chicken, maybe with a roasted skin. Chase that with some of this soup, and there’s a vegetable in it as well.
It’s a very plain, but very salty soup. And that vegetable is a little bit sour, vinegary, so I think it’s a pickled mustard green or something like that. Dip it into the sauce, that’s like sausage wrapped around the skewer. Okay, it’s pretty sweet.
That was a good coffee break stop and another plate of food and now we are just walking back down the alley. There are so many different choices of foods to eat within this alley.
We took a little walk down the road and they have a lot of street food carts and so I spotted a snack that I wanted to try. It is, there are a lot of different variations of this that I’ve seen all over Southeast Asia.
It’s very similar in cooking style method to a Sri Lankan hopper, but it’s cooked in a little personalized rounded skillet and what he does, the batter is green.
What he does is, he scoops in some batter, kinda sloshes it around and then it cooks. He puts the lid on and then it cooks so that the edges are crispy and then in the center it’s kind of fluffy and kind of like waffle-like. The edges are crispy all the way.
And then the inside is kind of sticky, gooey. It’s sweet and I’m not sure but I think the fragrance might be pandan because of that greeness. And it sort of has a very light, vanilla-y essence.
That’s a very simple, but kind of tasty sweet pancake snack. One of the most common types of street food that you’ll find in Jakarta are deep fried items.
And, so, all over the street you’ll find carts with a big wok full of oil deep frying, an assortment of different things and so for our next street food snack I just ordered a couple of deep fried items.
The first thing I got is a pisang goreng which is a deep fried banana. He took the banana and he kind of sliced it, but then kept the banana all together and kind of made it into a finger/hand shape.
It’s almost like a little glove mitt. How he cut it like this, in strips but keeping the whole thing together, it gives it more surface area for more crunchy batter and I think it’s a pretty cool way to cut a banana for deep frying it.
That is quite a lot of batter. And it’s very crispy and then there’s kind of a lot of batter to banana ratio, but then on the inside is the very sweet and kinda custard-y banana. It’s like a little banana sandwich.
For many of my growing up years, I lived in Africa, in central Africa. And when my family was living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I used to eat breadfruit all the time.
But then, since I was a child I haven’t had breadfruit very often and even where I live in Thailand, in Bangkok, breadfruit is not very common at all, actually. You can see sometimes on the tree, but it’s very rarely eaten.
So, I was happy to see he has deep fried breadfruit. This is just a big slice of breadfruit deep fried. That brings back some great memories. Breadfruit is awesome. This is just a natural phenomena of a fruit.
It is really like a very starchy, starchy bread. Kinda like a cross between bread and potato. Actually kinda like cassava.
It has that really dry starchiness to it and then this one is just really nicely salted, as well. So, it’s like a salty, silky, bread-y, potato.
And then it does have a little bit of a fruity taste to it. But that’s really heavy. I think partly why I like this so much is because I grew up, when I was a kid, eating this and I have so many memories of breadfruit.
That is such a starchy, it’s delicious actually. I really like it. It’s very heavy and dry. Chinatown’s around the world in different cities are one of my favorite places to explore.
And Chinatown here in Jakarta has been great. There’s a lot of food and a lot of cool places to explore. If you just kind of wander around these alleys. But Ying and I are gonna start heading a little ways North to some of the other historical buildings not too far away from here.
Crossing the street in this area is definitely not the easiest situation, but we gotta cross now. We are in the old historical heritage area of Jakarta now. And there is a lot of traffic in every direction.
We made it to the old area of Jakarta which is called Fatahillah which is the old Dutch colonial area. There are a lot of heritage Dutch buildings in this area.
We’re now in the big square, so we’re just going to walk around here for a little bit and just enjoy the scenery. Within this square, a lot of people are renting very colorful neon bikes and just riding around.
And then there a lot of students, and we met up with a group of students, and they wanted to ask some questions about why we are traveling to Indonesia and what we like about traveling to Indonesia.
And then one of the questions they asked me was why did you guys come to Indonesia? And when I told them that we came to Indonesia to eat, they all thought that was pretty funny.
I wasn’t sure if we were gonna be able to find this one street food snack that I really wanted to try called kerak telor.
And we happened to find it so we got lucky and he is making it right now. It was really genius watching him make it. What he does is, he first takes some raw rice and then puts it into the bottom of the wok.
And then he really heats up the wok, heats up that fire, fans the flames. And then he added a bunch of different seasonings including, I know there’s some coconut and probably some salt, I’m not sure what else.
And then after that he cracked in egg and then mixed it all up until it was like a slushy omelet rice mixture. And the true genius of what he does after that is, he actually flips the wok over, so, you would think gravity would make the entire rice omelet mixture just fall out of the wok, but somehow it stays on the bottom of the wok even thought it’s flipped upside down.
And that’s when he really fans the flames strong so it’s a big fire that comes up to the bottom of the wok there and just kind of scorches that rice and egg mixture. And then once it’s ready, he flips it back over, he scoops it out with a spatula, adds on some more seasoning, including a handful of crispy shallots, sticks it onto a piece of paper and it’s ready.
This is a street food snack that definitely has some history in Indonesia and I know that it was very popular since the colonial Dutch times. And it is truly a genius of a creation. I’m going to take my first bite.
Wow, that rice, it’s like a combination of a rice and omelet. And then there is definitely some coconut in there.But it’s not sweet, just natural coconut, I think. Like dried coconut, it’s a little bit crisp.
But that basically just tastes like a roasted rice egg omelet. It tastes like the bottom of clay pot rice. The crunchy, kind of slightly burnt bottom. So, it has that crispiness, but then with egg mixed in and dried coconut.
I’m really happy that we had a chance to try that final Jakarta street food. It’s kind of a simple combination, but I love the way he makes it.
And part of street food and eating snacks is just enjoying the atmosphere and watching them cook the food right before you. And that is just an absolute genius of a street food snack. I think I enjoyed it more watching the process of it being made than even eating it.
I think that is gonna be the end for today’s video about Jakarta street food. It’s been wonderful walking around. I am just drenched and hot and sweaty to the core, so I think we’re gonna jump in a taxi and head back to our hotel now.
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