Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Batik


This is a blog post a few months in the making: caranya membatik. How to batik. 

I can't remember exactly how this all got started, but one day I went to a batik shop in Yogya with my second host father and came home to Karangjati with a bunch of supplies. After that I spent a good number of hours after school drawing patterns on cloth with melted wax (called malan) using a batiking tool called a canting.


     There are many different sizes of canting, meaning the spout of the tool is larger or smaller depending on how detailed you need to be. I was told by an SMKI teacher that the canting should never be out of the malan for more than 15 seconds (which is longer than it sounds). I've found this is a good rule to follow because it makes sure the wax you're using is always hot, and it lessens the chance that you'll drip. A canting isn't an advanced tool; it's made from a piece of wood and thin metal cup/spout attached with wire, so if you let it sit over the cloth long enough, it's bound to drip. (And I am much too familiar with this, as you can see in the picture above). In order to batik, you dip the canting cup into the malan, fill it about half way or less, then directly draw it on the fabric. If the malan is too hot, it'll run out of the canting in a continuous stream; if it's too cold it won't come out at all. So you have to watch the consistency of the wax and adjust accordingly.
     The other necessity for batiking is the kompor, or burner. This is also not very advanced; the one I used was made of tin (and cost around four dollars). There are six strings dipped in oil that you light by hand, and a small lever to raise or lower the string tips to control the temperature (in theory). The kompor is sometimes frustrating- not heating evenly, or becoming too hot even at the lowest setting. Electric burners work much better, these are what they used at the professional batik shop where I once took a batik lesson. What would be better yet is an electric canting- looks like a hot glue gun- but these are expensive by Indonesian standards (over 30 US). And I figure if I'm going to learn to batik the traditional way (called 'tulis' or 'written' as opposed to 'cap' (stamped) batik, or the printed kind) I should use traditional tools. (I suppose the most traditional would have been using a ceramic, wood-burning kompor, like we used at the SMKI cook-out... That would have been a bit complicated though). 

                     

     There are two different kinds of malan that they sold at the batik store- brown and a lighter, clearish kind. Now, the picture above looks like I used both kinds, but that's just because the malan gets increasingly darker as it cooks in the kompor (I always bought the brown malan). Also, I admit, I liked to bake the heck out of my wax when I was first starting because the hotter the wax, the faster it spreads on the fabric, speeding up the whole process. This resulted in some messy lines and dark malan. I don't know if it will make a difference in the dying process, using well-done malan to batik, but hopefully my laziness didn't cost me too much. When I was first starting to batik everyone told me batiking was an art of patience- you have to work slowly. I thought I was all over the 'patience' thing, but as I got more practice and started caring more about the results, I stopped to change the malan in the canting more often (actually following the 15 second rule) and used cooler wax. You can see the difference between my first cloth and my last, too. Neater, less drips. 
    Now for the dying process. 
   Like I mentioned before, I took a short class at a batik shop (this was after I had started batiking at home, though another inbound signed up to take a class so I tagged along), and that was the first time I saw the batik dying process. It was intimidating, to say the least, particularly mixing the dye. There was a table full of little bags of white powder and a scale, and one of the workers would take spoonfuls of one powder, weigh it, then add another powder, weigh it again, take some away... As an Indonesian would say: pusing. Gives you a headache. After that I started thinking that I may not want to dye my fabric at home by myself- after all the hours I spent drawing on the wax, it'd be a pity to ruin the results because I'm a novice dyer. At this particular batik shop, they dipped the fabric in water first, then dipped it in another clear liquid, then dipped it in dye. For the first two steps, the fabric soaked just in plastic buckets but the color dye was poured into a hip-height cement trough and the fabric was pulled through the dye about six inches at a time until the whole pieces was colored. Then the fabric was hung on a line to dry for a few minutes, and if the color wasn't dark enough, they'd pull it through the dye again.



   Since I finished all of my wax work right before I changed houses, I enlisted the help of my third host mom to find a batik place that would dye my fabric for me (she took me to the place in Tamansari she regularly buys batik 'paintings' from). Here, they did a slightly different dyeing process. 


     First, the fabric was stretched and pinned onto a bamboo frame, then soaked with water. Pak Widoto (the person doing the dyeing) used a towel to wipe off the excess water, then started applying the dye. 
     

     He used a sponge to apply the dye, then used his fingers to blend the colors together (I chose to do two different types of blue). I'm not sure if this was the same type of dye as at the first shop, but it's machine washable, which is a plus. There are certain batik fabrics that are hand-wash only (which wouldn't be too big of a deal since I'm already experienced in that particular area :) ).    

                            

     After finishing putting on the dye, Pak Widoto said we have to wait until the fabric completely dries,  soak it again with water, wait for it to dry, then finally boil off the wax. This part I didn't see, but I did get a glimpse of it at the first batik shop. The fabric is put into a big metal pot of boiling water, stirred around with a stick for awhile, then taken out to dry. Fingers crossed my batik turns out well! I really like how the pattern looked with the gold wax and blue dye, but hopefully it looks just as good when the motif is white (after the wax is gone, leaving the plain white fabric). We should be picking up the final product in the next few days. Pak Widoto said it'd be ready by Monday or Tuesday, but my host mother Bu Dwi said, for the Javanese, that means Wednesday or Thursday. 
    To round out my post, as always, I have to add a piece about food. Last Friday I finally met a chance to redeem myself, though it wasn't fish brain this time but goat brain (either goat or sheep, Indonesians call them both by the same name). I went to a street-side food stand that sold sop kaki kambing- goat foot soup- and just about every other odd piece of meat/tissue you can find on a goat, including the brain. My host father and I bought a good mix of everything  and brought it home, where I carefully fished out a piece of brain from broth. It was a modest chunk, white and squiggly, and it turned right to mush in my mouth, like a cracker that's been left in soup for too long. I managed to eat the one piece, but I definitely didn't ask for a second taste. Now, I've eaten intestine with rancid smelling I-don't-want-to-know-what on the inside (and that tasted awful, really) but brain is still something that I'm less than enthusiastic about putting on my spoon. It doesn't even taste bad, but still makes my insides squirm, and that's frustrating. I suppose that's something I just have to accept. Brain isn't my thing. 
    For my little time remaining in Indonesia I have several more events on my culinary agenda, so stay tuned. I'm experiencing a last minute burst of blogging energy- I still have so much more to tell about my experiences here in Yogya before I'm a plain old American again. 

Until next time! Sampai jumpa!







Saturday, May 19, 2012

Borobudur, Prambanan, dan Rendang

     Last weekend I visited Borobudur for the third time, but I still have yet to post a blog about it. Pemalas. Lazy. However it works out well now that I just got back from Prambanan, the other major temple in Yogya, so I can blog about them both in one post. According to everyone I've talked to, foreigners and Indonesians alike, Borobudur is big but Prambanan is more beautiful. In my opinion they're both stunning, but I happen to like Borobudur better (the park is better kept and the temple and surroundings are more photogenic).
   Borobudur is a Buddhist temple about an hour north of Yogya, and Prambanan is a Hindu temple located on the east side of the city. Every month at Prambanan there is an outdoor performance of Ramayana, a long Indonesian mythical story (depicted through traditional dance) which I hope to see in the next few weeks. Here are a few pictures of each temple:

 In order to read the carvings of Borobudur, you walk around the temple clockwise, starting from the bottom.
There are nine levels to Borobudur, and the progression from the bottom level to the top of the temple represents ascension to Nirvana. 



The view from the very top.
Candi Prambanan



This is the biggest temple at Prambanan, dedicated to Shiva.

Surrounding the primary eight temples of Prambanan are ruins from other smaller, uncovered temples. The legend of the Prambanan temple complex, briefly, is that a princess was ordered to marry the person who had killed her father, so she said that she would marry him only if he could build her one thousand temples in one night. Her courter then called upon his own dead father and enlisted the help of ghosts and demons to build all the temples. My host father told me that if I ever get proposed to, I should ask the guy to build me a thousand temples, and see how it works out. 

     Now for a quick change of subject: last Thursday I got the chance to take another Indonesian cooking class. This time I cooked for real, not just make snacks. I went back to AKS and learned to make nasi kuning, nasi kebuli, arem-arem, tempe kering, sambal kelapa, and rendang. Nasi kuning (yellow rice) is served at celebrations (it's shaped into a tall cone and someone important is chosen to take out the first scoop. If you remember the SMKI 50th birthday celebration at the very beginning of my year, I served the first cut of nasi kuning to the sultan of Yogya but didn't understand what was going on. What? A mountain of rice? And where am I supposed to take it?) and generally it's paired with tempe kering and sambal kelapa, along with other dishes of choice. So now I can cook myself a traditional Indonesian welcome home party when I get back (though I'll have to guess at how to shape the rice into a cone...) Nasi kebuli is rice cooked with several different spices, an Arab dish. I've been wanting to make arem-arem all year (rice filled with spicy shredded chicken, wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed) and turns out it's really easy to make, but really difficult to wrap. My hopes of making arem-arem for my extended family have been extinguished- though perhaps it'll be easier to fold and skewer a corn husk than a banana leaf (I figure this would be the closest substitution). 
     The highlight of my lesson was rendang- said to be the most delicious food in the world. Rendang is a combination of spices and coconut milk that you can cook with meat or eggs (the most well-known is with beef) and you boil it down until it makes a thick pasty coating around whatever you're cooking. The first time I tried it I was certainly taken aback- the flavor is Intense and almost hurt, like when you eat too many Sour Patch Kids- it wasn't spicy in the chili sense, but had so many other spices that it was like a flavor bombardment. The rendang I made at AKS was the same way; my host mother said I should make the spices a little less strong if I cook it in the States, so people can enjoy it :) I think I prefer the spice explosion on my palate, though. 
     And you're due for an update: I changed host families a week ago, so I'm now living in Yogya again (actually, only a few streets away from my first house). I'll admit I'm sad to leave village life behind. I miss boiling water in the morning for my tea, and washing my own dishes and clothes. I guess that means I'm a creature of routine. But I am very happy in my new home with Bu Dwi, Pak Benny, and my two host brothers Mas Aldi and Ardi; I just have to wait to build a new routine back in the city. And I have to say- air conditioning is so nice. 
   That's the news for now. I hope everyone is enjoying the summer back in Minnesota! I have to wait a few more weeks until my vacation starts, the last day of finals at SMKI is June 12th. I'm looking forward to testing time, just because I think I'm going to do fairly well (and there's no pressure because I don't actually get graded. How do you think traditional dance scores would transfer anyways?). I'll certainly let you know how things go :)

Sampai jumpa semuanya! 



Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Belajar Bikin Kue Tradisional


Now that I only have a few weeks left here in Indonesia (a few weeks, is that right??) I’ve been thinking about everything I’ve done so far, and what I have yet to do in the little time that remains! Ah stressful. But in the best way possible.
            Before leaving Minnesota, I had made a “To Do List” for my exchange year here in Indonesia- and I don’t think I even brought it with me. I don’t know if I’ll be able to recall all ten goals, but this is a good time to go through it and see how I’ve done so far.
            Firstly, ‘Learn bahasa Indonesia’ was surely on my list, and I think it’s safe to say I can check that one off (thankfully- I remember when I first arrived here and I was so frustrated with not being able to communicate. I had also thought that Indonesian would ‘just come to me’ after awhile, since I had heard it was such an easy language to learn, but that turned out to be wishful thinking). Also on my list was ‘learn traditional dance’. Double check that one, and write SMKI afterwards circled with a big heart. Now I’m not sure, but fairly certain, that ‘learn to cook Indonesian food’ was on there- which leads me to my main point for this post…
            Around the middle of my exchange I had mentioned to a Rotarian that I’d like to learn to make Indonesian kue (translates to ‘cake’, but this can mean anything from a popover to jelly snack) particularly because one of the Yogya Tugu Rotarians owns a bakpia bakery. One of my very first posts about food here mentioned how I liked bakpia, and I really wanted to get the recipe. The trip to the bakery never worked out, but I did get quite a good replacement: lessons at AKS, a vocational academy for cooking, sewing, and hairdressing/cosmetics, and visits to three different kitchens to learn to make an assortment of snacks, kue lapis, and moci. Good thing I had five days off of school so I could fit this all in!
            First I went to the snack shop owned by a friend of the Yogya Tugu Youth Exchange Program coordinator. She runs a small shop, but also distributes to markets around the city, and caters and fills private orders. Here I helped make risoles, martabak telur, kroket, and lumpia. These are all fried snacks- the martabak and lumpia use a stir fry filling and are wrapped in a thin pancake, and the krokets and risoles are potato dough mixed with veggies or minced meat and then rolled in bread crumbs. I also watched the making of roll cake and ‘brownies’, which aren’t like American brownies at all, but just chocolate cake. One quick note here: Indonesians love to mix chocolate with cheese. I thought this was so odd when I first arrived, but it’s become a normal sight. And if you ever make it over to this side of the world and order cheesecake, just know you won’t get a heavy cream cheese pie, but a frosted vanilla cake with shredded white cheddar cheese on top. They also make many other snacks and pastries which I hope I can learn how to make, too, at some point.

Here's the Indonesian brownies and cheesecake, as well as a danish, risoles, lumpia, kroket, fruit pie, pisang goreng (fried banana), macaroni, and what I think is called suis (like a bite size chicken salad sandwich).
            Next, on to AKS. Here I worked with Suster Maria Angela, a nun who teaches cooking classes at the academy, and together we made mento, dadar gulung, talam ubi, kelepon, and onde-onde. One thing that I’ve learned about Indonesian cooking is that there are usually a ton of spices, and none of them are in powder form. This is good because it means all the spices are fresh, but it also means you have to prepare most of them using a mortar and pestle. Turns out crushing spices is hard work; I’m not very good at it. A lot of recipes use garlic and you have to smash the cloves into a paste before adding the other ingredients- for me that’s the hardest. Pepper is pretty difficult, too, because the kernels like to fly off the mortar when I’m attempting to crack them into powder.

Suster Maria crushing the mento spices (because I was taking forever) at AKS. If you can see on the table there's fresh daun sirih, daun jeruk, jahe, merica, and other spices.
            So technically these were lessons to just make snacks, but the recipes sure took a long time to complete. Now, dadar gulung and mento are basically the same thing, filling wrapped in a thin pancake, except the first is filled with coconut and the mento is filled with chicken stir fry, then covered in coconut sauce and wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed.  Talam ubi is a funny Jello-like snack half flavored with coconut milk and half with ubi (like a sweet potato, but bright purple). Kelepon looks the weirdest- small green balls of rice dough filled with melted gula jawa (palm sugar) and rolled in coconut flakes. Lastly, onde-onde is simply fried dough filled with mashed soybeans. Notice all the coconut? It tastes delicious, but also explains why I gained about five pounds during just five days, trying all these traditional snacks. This was also the second time that I’ve been told I should become a nun since coming to Indonesia- and Suster Maria said they have a convent in the U.S., too. We have plans to move there together and open up an Indonesian restaurant ;) If I ever do get around to becoming a nun, anyways.

Mento 
Mento after being wrapped in the banana leaf
Talam Ubi

Onde-Onde
All of my snacks for the weekend- the dadar gulung are the green wraps on the plate, moci is the white balls in the middle, then kelepon are on the far right. 
            The kue lapis and moci visits were just to watch, but I hope to get back to the moci place sometime to actually learn the process start to finish. Moci (pronounced mo-chee) has a very odd texture, though I like it. It’s made from tepung ketan (glutinous rice flour), sugar, and water all mixed together, and becomes stretchy and sticky like raw dough. Traditionally the moci is rolled into sheets, covered with chopped peanuts and then rolled and cut into bite size pieces. This particular seller uses jelly, too, as filling (my favorite is lemon).

            So I’m glad I put Indonesian cooking on my to-do list. It turned out to keep me quite busy, as I hope to continue the visits/lessons in the coming month. For now, I think I can check this one off the list. I hope the next item to be checked off will be ‘learning to batik’, but I still have a bit to go before finishing that one. Once I have a finished product, I’ll post about the whole process and such. Going further on down the list, I know there are two items I’ll have to scratch out, because I won’t be able to do them this year. The first is surfing- I’ve mentioned before that the beaches around Yogya aren’t suitable for swimming, let alone taking beginner’s surfing lessons, and I don’t think a trip to the good surfing beaches is in the cards for me. The next is hiking up a mountain/volcano. Ahhhh I wanted to do this so bad, and I’ve asked about it multiple times but it seems like there’s no way to make it possible. The road and trails up Merapi are still closed from the last eruption, which would have been my go-to volcano, and it doesn’t seem like the Rotarians are crazy about me going out trekking in the jungle outside of Yogya. Sigh. We’ll save this for the return trip in a few years I suppose.
            There are other items that will have to be scratched out as well; I think I had one about visiting Aceh or some far away part of Indonesia that’s a long shot, and I’m still holding out for a chance to go snorkeling or diving but who knows. I’ll have to ask my parents to dig around at home for my list (it’s odd to think I still have a bunch of stuff sitting on the other side of the world…), though more likely I brought it with me here and lost it. Dia agak pelupa, my host sister often says about me. I’m a little forgetful.
            I certainly had some big dreams while writing my list. At the time I really had hoped to do all of those things, but I feel like my exchange has still been more productive, rewarding, and out of the ordinary than I ever expected, regardless of whether my To Do boxes are all checked off or not. There’s so much more to a student exchange than the sum of individual activities or trips. I’d have to say I’m more proud of becoming accustomed to using the bathroom here than getting to lay on the beach in Bali- give me a bucket of water and a pail and I can shower in under ten minutes. Now that’s remarkable.

So I’ll keep on moving down my list of goals and quietly pass over the ones I now know to be unfeasible, impractical, or simply superficial, and I won’t feel any less fulfilled. I’ve learned to thrive in a foreign country and that’s all I ever wanted. Tetap sukses. Next June I’ll come home laden with incredible pictures, clothes, and an assortment of other new items that I've harvested throughout my year, yet it’ll be the journey of learning that is the true treasure. (Because nothing builds character like learning how to use a no-flush, in-ground toilet.) 

Sampai jumpa!