Ngelawar (lawar making) is a frequent activity on Bali. Formerly, traditional Balinese lawar was only made in conjunction with Galungan feast days, temple anniversaries and customary or religious ceremonies. Lawar can now be made any time, especially to commemorate Indonesia’s national day or for festivities to welcome the New Year. In Tabanan regency, ngelawar is commonly performed by young teenage boys in rural communities. They spontaneously buy an amount of meat, and since it is not a religious event, the exact type of meat and the kind of menu that is required is more flexible. Financed by high priests, lucky hamlets will slaughter a pig and employ it to make Bali’s favorite pork lawar delicacy. The meat is also processed into other types of lawar, grilled dishes, satay and local specialties. The young men make auspicious cones of rice, Manila duck lawar, grilled fish, young banana trunk soup and assorted fresh cakes (jaja). Seated face to face megibung style on bamboo mats, the boys are dressed in temple attire as they chop the ingredients into slivers with traditional cleavers on tree trunk cutting boards. Endless rows of smoking satays on thin sticks will also be fanned and grilled on braziers on the ground to cheer up the workers. This traditional food festival also celebrates the anniversary of the founding of the village youth club. Staged at the local hamlet hall, the joyous annual December event, replete with family atmosphere, celebrates the end of the old year and welcomes in the new one. Traditional Balinese dances are performed and the rice cone is ceremonially cut.
Specialty lawar abounds in Bali. The exotic hallmark of lawar embung, a traditional recipe from Tabanan, is sliced fresh young bamboo mixed with peanuts, peanut leaf and meat. Today’s increasingly urbanized Balinese, however, no longer relish eating bamboo (embung) and recall the difficulties of cutting down the tree and slicing it, and thus lawar embung is a village rarity nowadays. Apart from ceremonies, various kinds of lawar, including jackfruit, can be sampled at local babi guling warung. Spicy red hot padamare lawar is a combination of many kinds of lawar together (padam means to put out a fire; it also means fiery red or scarlet). This very heavily peppered lawar recreates the historical taste of original Balinese food, uncorrupted by the introduction of chilies in the sixteenth century and other culinary concessions to the modern age. Negara regency boasts its own Balinese recipe for chicken lawar in which young coconut is the core ingredient.
To process the coconut, villagers pour out the water, scrape the soft skin from inside the shell, boil it in water and then press out the excess water by hand. The resulting material is chopped into small pieces and combined with a spice paste mixture (bumbu), onions and a small free-range boiled Balinese chicken. The Balinese draw daily on their ancient heritage and religious culinary imagination to create superb dishes geared towards the gods.
Vegetables (sayur) are eagerly recruited into festival culinary service. Vegetable and fruit dishes, such as fried winged beans (botor), bean sprouts with crushed peanuts and grated coconuts dyed a reverential yellow with turmeric, are an integral part of Bali’s festival cuisine. Vegetarian lawar is made with ferns, egg and long green beans mixed with grated coconut, shallots, garlic cloves, red chilies, small hot green chilies, kaffir lime, salt and bumbu spice paste.
Elaborately executed bebek betutu (whole smoked duck), babi guling (suckling pig) and jukut ares (classic banana tree trunk soup) also feature prominently on the temple-bound menu. The Balinese marshal condiments, oddments, bananas and coconuts to turn almost anything edible into an outstanding village delicacy. The tender harvested core of a young banana palm stem, resembling a crunchy, rounded piece of bamboo with tiny holes, is very thinly sliced and boiled with spices, minced meat (pork or beef), duck (wings, legs and head) or chicken to make jukut ares, a substantial aromatic stew composed of young banana tree trunk and meat. Banana pods (the flower buds) can be used instead. (Stems from the mature banana plants are only used as pig food on Bali.) The resulting dish will be called serosop. Ares (which means the pith of the banana plant) is typically served at large ritual feasts and to family and neighbors who assisted in cooking, making offerings and arranging the ceremonies.
Ceremonial tum is cooked daily in many family compounds for Bali’s ceremonies. Tum are minced parcels of ground pork, duck, chicken, chicken liver (tum hati ayam), fish, beef or eel liberally laced with shallots, ginger, garlic, kaffir lime leaves, chilies, turmeric, lesser galangal, salam leaves, sambal and spice paste. Tum starts out similarly to saté lilit but it contains no grated coconut or palm sugar. The pasty mixtures are packed into triangular, pleated banana leaf purses or corn husks to create this classic Balinese ritual dish. The purses are sealed with either a sharp banana stick, a sharpened coconut leaf rib used specially for fastening leaf-wrapped packages or, more usually, with a tiny bamboo stick called a semat. Shaped to look like a holy mountain peak, they are then steamed. Chicken or fish tum is also prepared as an occasional, everyday food for lunch or dinner. Created and conveyed with love, art and reverence for the gods, Bali’s temple-bound food offerings are purified by white-robed, bell-ringing high priests, sprinkled with holy water and then carried home to be eaten. Nourishment dances and vacillates between sustenance and sacrifice on an island of the gods perfectly positioned and protected eight degrees south of the equator.
Red Pork Lawar with Blood
LAWAR MERAH (BAHASA INDONESIA), OR LAWAR BARAK (BALINESE)
In this holy covenant between god, man and food, lawar is the undisputed high priest of festival cuisine. Each different lawar dish is impossibly time-consuming and complex in its creation and preparation, offering deeply harmonized layers of texture and flavor in a glorious Balinese presentation. It is sacred work and ritualized worship. The gods cook here for all the world to see.
Recipe courtesy of Cok Oka Derana, Guwang village, Gianyar, Bali, 2008. Cok Oka, a Satria caste prince, works as a bellboy at the Inna Kuta Beach Hotel, Kuta. His brother, Cok Raka, is a woodcarver-artist and maintains an impressive local art gallery in their home compound in Guwang. A happy, always smiling ambassador of his beloved island, Cok Oka is dedicated to promoting and preserving native Balinese culture, ceremonies and traditions.
11 oz (300 g) good quality pork
11 oz (300 g) pork skin
1 bowl pig’s blood
11 oz (300 g) long green beans
½ piece young jackfruit
1¼ lb (600 g) shallots
11 oz (300 g) garlic cloves
½ coconut
small amount of coconut milk with spices (kalas)
11 oz (300 g) chilies
½ piece white ginger and ½ piece yellow ginger
½ package very hot small peppers (merica)
lemongrass
shrimp paste
¼ tsp lesser galangal
black and white pepper and salt to taste
brown sugar to taste
First, prepare the bumbu or spice paste mixture. Peel and slice the shallots, half the garlic cloves and the white ginger, then fry. Complete the bumbu mixture with finely minced fried chilies, fried shrimp paste, brown sugar, black pepper, white pepper and salt. Grind all the above ingredients to a fine powder.
Boil the sliced pork skin, young jackfruit and long beans. Use ¾ of the young coconut, grated. Use the rest of the coconut—preferably half a coconut—for kalas (coconut milk with spices) for lawar jukut (vegetarian lawar) or for lawar putih (white lawar). Mix the coconut with blood to make it red, then grill (burn) the coconut. Add sugar. Peanut leaf or other vegetables can be added to the pork lawar according to preference.
Prepare the pork meat by chopping it into very small particles until smooth. Grill the meat first. Add some bumbu, terasi, salt, brown sugar, hot chilies and finely sliced pandanus leaves. Mix together. Make the mixture flat and level.
Crackling, sliced pork skin (kulit babi)—good color skin.
Fry garlic and add