Dried chilli, red chilli, green chilli, and cabai rawit are part of the seasoning and are always part of our sambalS6. With the exception of some foreign friends, I hardly know anyone who doesn't like sambal and spicy food. I think this is what makes Indonesians living abroad so homesick. In western countries I have never tasted food or chilli sauce that was genuinely spicy. You rarely find a bottle of hot sauce in a restaurant in America. They have pepper sauce, in a sort of liquid form like Tabasco. Usually it is added in little drops to a pizza or in Cajun seasoning. Europe is the same with only pepper sauce or ground pepper to spice things up. In Mexico they are famous for their jalapeno, a fat green pepper 59cm long they consider hot, but to me seems pretty mild. In Asia things get much better.
Bottled chilli sauces from Thailand and Vietnam are well known and available in specialist stores across America and Europe, but they have a sweet and sour flavour to them. The only equivalent to the Indonesian chilli style is to be found in real Thai food in Thailand, and you won't find it in restaurants catering to tourists. It is definitely worth trying a Tom Yam in a bustling Thai marketplace... you are going to cry! Not only is it boiling hot, it is also super spicy. If you cough, you will get that stinging sensation all down the inside of your nose. Like wasabi, the spiciness is more nasal than oral.
When I was at school in the Philippines we sometimes had dinners where we shared food from our native countries. Indian spicy food is well known, but for me, it is not as hot as Indonesian food. For Filipinos though, just eating an Indian curry is enough to bring them to tears. When I make fried rice, Indians cry! On campus my "Trinity Sauce" became quite popular. Because I was so into sambal, in the end I just had to make my own when I went to restaurants. So I would ask for some soy sauce and site (red chilli in Tagalog), then chop the chilli into small slices and mix it into the sauce with a spoon. This simple "recipe" got around, especially among the Indian students who thought the Philippine food not spicy at all. This despite one Filipino bottle proudly bearing a large label declaring it the "World's hottest hot sauce" but it was not even as hot as sambal ABC.
However hot Javanese sambal might get, for me it is never too much, and after a drink the spicy sensation is gone. Su matran food, including Padang which is known for its spiciness, is pretty standard to my mind, and the same goes for the food in Kalimantan. Bali is famous for its Sambal Matah which really is delicious but it is not that hot. Near Gilimanuk harbour there is a warung selling Betutu chicken that is famous for its fiery sambal. It was definitely hot, but I saw the cook adding lots of cabe rawit, which showed that the sambal itself was not that powerful.
So it set me thinking maybe there is some truth to the Wallace line. This invisible boundary separates Indonesia into two according to the flora and fauna of each part. Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan and Bali make up the western part, and the flora and fauna here are similar to those found in the rest of Asia. From Lombok and Sulawesi to the East there are more similarities with Australia. From my experience of eating chilli, I would say the most powerful is from the eastern side of this line. Bali and Lombok are separated by only 35 km of sea but the difference in the taste of their chilli is huge! And the further east you go, the hotter it gets.
One example in Lombok was the Ayam Taliwang we had at a roadside warung. There was no way you could stand it! Yasmin had to dip her chicken in her tea to get all the seasoning off. When we were in East Lombok we were given Sambal Beberok every day. It was ridiculously spicy! The taste was just explosive and made your eyes water and your nose run. Even after washing your hands several times, if you touched your eyes, they would sting.
Don't be caught out by the food from Manado either, it can be incredibly spicy. Try the Beautica restaurant in Jakarta and order one of the dishes with four red chillies next to it on the menu. You don't need to ask how hot it is! I get an upset stomach every time I go there. The Manadonese can't even eat fried bananas without dipping it in sambal. It gets even worse in Manado itself. Once I went to a friend's wedding in Tondano and the buffet lunch was just too much. Their sambal itself is not that dangerous but they put chilli in absolutely everything. I found myself constantly taking sharp breaths to try and put out the fires raging in my mouth.
In Palu a friend invited me out for instant noodles by the side of the road. The warung's slogan was "It's really spicy!" When I accepted the offer, I just thought we were going for some cheap noodles. It turned out that they actually fried and mixed the noodles with sambal. My friend ordered me a "twothree" portion, meaning I was given two portions of noodles with three portions of sambal. The premade chilli sauce was kept in a jar; a single portion was a full table spoon. When the noodles arrived they just looked black. The first couple of mouthfuls were fine, but the third... whatever taste the noodles previously had was gone and it was just hot, hot and hot! This was the only time I ever felt like I had actually gone deaf eating instant fried noodles.
However, to this day the winner is still the chilli from Flores. On a rainy evening in Labuan Bajo we felt like having some instant noodles with cabai rawit. So I bought the noodles myself at the grocery store and asked the hotel to cook them for us. When I asked for cabai rawit, the cook said, "Hang on, I will go pick some from the garden." He returned with some chillies that were red rather than green, and even smaller than the cabai rawit we usually get in Java. He chopped just a single chilli into the noodles and... it was much too much!
It was like that for three days on the boat, they gave us a bowl of sambal when we ate but we never managed to finish it. Just a pinch of sambal with a whole plate of rice and we were out. It was really unbelievable and it took ages to recover. Puffy lips, eyes that won't stop weeping, ringing ears. After every meal we just collapsed on the cushions shaking our heads. Chilli!
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