‘Mortar & Pestle’ Is the Best Guide to Indonesian Home Cooking

There are those of us who think of cooking as something of a chore — the less time in the kitchen, the better. Then there are folks like me, who relish visiting specialty grocery stores to hunt for ingredients and like nothing better than spending an entire day in the kitchen, nose in a cookbook, learning how another culture cooks.

That’s why I was immediately interested in Mortar and Pestle: Classic Indonesian Recipes for the Modern Kitchen, the fifth cookbook from Pat Tanumihardja. Born in Java, Indonesia, and raised in Singapore, Tanumihardja grew up learning to cook from her mother, Juliana Evari Suparman. Suparman, a native Javan, is a keen cook who turned her cooking passion into one of Seattle’s first Indonesian restaurants, Julia’s Indonesian Kitchen (which she sold in 2011). I’ve appreciated Tanumihardja’s previous works, including The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook, because she writes thoroughly detailed recipes and with a vivid, friendly tone. What better way to dip my toe into a cuisine I knew nothing about than with an author I already trusted?

True to the book’s title, a mortar and pestle is used in nearly every recipe to create bumbu bumbu, the spice pastes that lend a panoply of complex flavors to Tanumihardja’s 75 noodle dishes, soups, curries, and grilled foods. Grinding away on a mortar full of shallots, toasted spices, lemongrass, and galangal is just the sort of kitchen alchemy I love. But Tanumihardja is aware that it’s not everyone’s idea of fun, and suggests employing a mini food processor if pestling isn’t your thing.

That willingness to pivot, simplify, or substitute is woven throughout Mortar and Pestle. As a total newb, I found Tanumihardja’s laid-back attitude reassuring. “I’m the first to admit that Indonesian recipes often require a lot of ingredients. I’m also the first to say that it’s okay to omit the hard-to-find ones,” Tanumihardja writes. No candlenuts? Use macadamias. Don’t have access to kecap manis (the sweet soy sauce ubiquitous in Indonesian cooking)? There’s a three-ingredient recipe so you can make your own. Don’t love frying food? There’s a note about how to use an air fryer.

Tanumihardja is also the author of four children’s books, including Ramen for Everyone. Her playful, encouraging tone carries over in Mortar and Pestle. She describes pandan leaves blended with coconut as “grass clippings,” calls herself out as a spice “wuss,” and teases her father for his love of kecap manis, revealing that he even travels with a bottle of the sweet-salty condiment in his luggage. Tanumihardja relays her wisdom and recipes with a sense of discovery and fun, so although I had trepidation, I was less afraid of messing up, certain that if I tweaked a recipe, all would be well.

I started with the roasted whole fish rubbed with spice paste, an easy win. It was just a matter of making a paste of aromatics in my mini chopper, stuffing the paste into slashes cut into a whole branzino, and roasting the fish in a hot oven. Twenty minutes later, I had very moist fish full of gingery garlic bits, and a newfound confidence with cooking (and eating) whole fish. Smashed chicken with green sambal is another dish I’ll be adding to my repertoire. Essentially a chicken stir-fry finished with a smoky green chile paste, the only effort it required was seeding and roasting jalapeños and grinding them with lemongrass, lime leaves, and a little sugar. (Note to self: Turn on the exhaust fan before you start.) The leftovers served as a brilliant taco filling the next day, just as the headnote promised they would.

Other recipes weren’t quite as quick, but really delivered on the flavor front. The peanut gravy required frying raw peanuts (or using the type you grind in-store) and grinding them with 11 other ingredients. It was a bit of an involved process, but the taste of rich fried peanuts combined with caramel-y palm sugar, funky chile paste, herbal lime leaves, and tart tamarind was so vividly delicious that one of my pickiest friends tried it and declared, “I want to roll around in that.” Another game changer was the Oma’s grilled pork satay. Shellacked in a marinade of palm sugar, toasted coriander, turmeric, and lemongrass, it had the adults at my table arm-wrestling for the last skewer. The headnote tip to buy ultra-thin bulgogi pork slices from a Korean market was worth the price of the book alone.

The only hiccups I encountered were the relative spiciness of some of the recipes and my own lack of familiarity with some of the ingredients and sub-recipes. I ended up bookmarking the pantry section buried in the back of the book to more easily reference unfamiliar ingredients. It’s a minor quibble, but providing English translations of some of those ingredients — air asam, acar campur, sambal terasi — within the recipes themselves would help beginners like me.

As for the chiles, I can now say I’ve learned my limit. While I loved the nuanced combo of lime leaves, tomato, and toasted spices in the spicy eggplant recipe, the recipe also calls for four Fresno chiles plus two red bird chiles. I don’t doubt Tanumihardja’s decision to include them, but no one at my table could handle more than small bites at a time. I ran into a similar issue with the book’s spicy sheet-pan fried rice. Its seasoning mix includes 1 tablespoon of sambal terasi (jarred chile paste with dried shrimp) and I found myself diving for yogurt to soothe my wounded mouth halfway through a plate of it. This was a user error, really. I know better. Moving forward, I’m taking the author’s advice in the introduction to heart: Start with less; you can always add more, but it is harder to take the spice away.

Learning a new cuisine can be one of life’s great pleasures if you’ve got the right cookbook to work from. Mortar and Pestle provides sage cooking guidance woven together with cultural context and personal anecdotes that make it fun to both read and cook from. I’m a long way from understanding a cuisine as complex as Indonesia’s, but as Tanumihardja states in the introduction, practice makes progress.

Ivy Manning is a Portland, Oregon-based award-winning food writer and author of 10 cookbooks, including Tacos A to Z: A Delicious Guide to Nontraditional Tacos. She is a regular recipe tester and editor for Eater as well as restaurants and appliance brands.