Bali Cooking Class, Cooking school, Bali Food Information

The Balinese food is very different compared with our Western Cuisine. When you once understand the idea of Balinese food, many recipes are very simple. But to understand a bit of it, let us escape for a moment to the normal day of an average Balinese family. In the early morning, a married woman will go to the market to buy all the needs of the day. In her basket you will find fresh vegetable, different root-spices like ginger, laos and kencur to prepare the tasty bumbus, some fermented soya-bean cake and maybe a little bit of pork or chicken meat or perhaps dried fish.

Important are the different kind of chillies as well as some banana-leafs for wrapping special meals and of course many shallots and garlic. On a special stall she will buy some Balinese sweets made from rice, called jaja what she will have for breakfast together with her husband. The normal Balinese kitchen has no refrigerator, so there is no need of big storage because the bought ingredients for the meals will be quick used. The woman steams the rice once a day and cooks the other meal, which will be taken from the family members mostly twice a day.

The Balinese people don’t have a social sitting together for their meals in their daily routine, they just sit somewhere in a corner of their family compound and eat silently their food. Only during family ceremonies and temple festivals the eating of the food has a social aspect. But not only to take the meal together, the people of the village – when there is a big festival – will even prepare the meals together under strong advice from elder men who knows about the very complicated preparation of the special ceremony food.
 

It is a pity that many tourists never try real Balinese food. What they mostly eat in the restaurants sounds sometimes like original food, for example Nasi Goreng, but it is just rice with some vegetable, meat and sweet and salty soya-sauce and tomato-sauce. But of course the Balinese kitchen has to offer more than these ingredients. And a real Nasi Goreng gets its wonderful taste through the tasty bumbu. Lucky that meanwhile you find more and more restaurants with traditional cooking i.e. like the famous Bumbu Bali in Tanjung Benoa, La Indonesia in Jimbaran and in the North the tropics, where we offer you this traditional cooking-class.

So when you learn about bumbus, you come close to the secrets of Balinese food. These pastes are a special mixture from ingredients like shallots, garlic, chillies, candlenuts, lemon grass, salam leaves, ginger, laos, kencur and tumeric and others. Then you learn about the use of coconuts in the Balinese kitchen as well as the usage of peanuts, palm sugar and so on. A cooking-class of Balinese food is absolutely worth to join. Many ingredients you find meanwhile in the Asia-Shops all over the world and you will be astonished how much you will enrich your kitchen with the unique flavor of Balinese food.