Food hunting

One of many things that I miss the most after leaving Malaysia is mamak food. Probably not many Indonesians know what mamak food is. ‘mamak’ itself is a term that describes muslim indian and/or mixed malay-indian community in Malaysia. Therefore, mamak food is one of many varieties of Malaysian cuisine of mamak community that originated from southern india, as most or probably all of mamak people came from this region, mostly from Tamil-Nadu and Kerala. Mamak food is highly popular among malaysians and eating at mamak stall or restaurant has become a common habit for malaysians. Some people label mamak food as junk food considering its high cholesterol food and yet so many people like eating the food, including me.

Almost everyday, sometimes twice a day, morning before class and afternoon after class, I dropped by at mamak stall to have some treats. Usually in the morning I ordered roti chanai with curry soup or roti boom with curry soup. For those who don’t know roti chanai, just imagine martabak without its filling, only its wrap. Roti boom is a modified roti chanai, added with sugar and extra margarine which make it more tastier, greasier. And in the afternoon I ordered plain rice or sometimes briyani rice with honey chicken. Briyani rice is basmati rice (long grains, not sticky, unlike indonesian rice that has very short grains and stickier) cooked in lamb stock. I heard that it is also cooked with yoghurt.

Curry, greasy and oily are common knowledge of so many Indonesian people for indian cuisine. Although indian food is not as familiar in Indonesia as it is in Malaysia, but it highly affected local cuisine such as minang and acehnese food that use high proportion of coconut milk and curry. Unfortunately, there is no mamak food in Indonesia, especially in Jakarta. There are quit number of indian restaurants, but they are usually exclusive and quite expensive, unlike mamak food which can be found at every corner of KL town and very affordable to most people.

There is a very very nice lady who is my next door neighbor. She is an arab descent who loves to cook. Almost every weekend she delivers her extra food to our house. Sometimes regular local food, sometimes her ancestor food, yes, arab food. I also like arab food and it reminds me of times when having mamak food in KL, since they are very similar in cooking style. There were several times she sent kebuli rice (similar like briyani, only greasier) with lamb chop in a quite large portion. This just gave me the idea to hunt arab cuisine in Jakarta. Yup, pretending to be Bondan Winarno, a culinary expert, I already have a target restaurant to visit, so just wait for my next posting.

Picture: dailymuscle

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