The supper club chef explains the nuances of Indonesian food and shares her recipe for pisang goreng – banana fritters – a favourite of her mum’s
words TONY NAYLOR recipe photograph NASSIMA ROTHACKER
MY FAVOURITE DISH
Rahel Stephanie’s supper club, Spoons, started as a “very casual venture”. It was, the 28-year-old freely admits, “an excuse to get all my friends in one place and serve them Indonesian food.” But, as the heat around this plant-based event has grown (The Face magazine called it London’s “most exciting supper club”), so too has Rahel’s desire to correct misconceptions about her native cuisine.
For example, sate (as Indonesians spell it, not satay) does not refer to a peanut sauce. Instead, it is a category of “over 200 skewered dishes. Admittedly, the most popular is sate Madura with peanut sauce, but skewered sate meats are served with many different sauces.”
Rahel has been chewing over these misunderstandings since arriving in London as a student, aged 19. Craving her favourite dishes and shocked at the lack of Indonesian food, she set about teaching herself to cook with the help of “the Indonesian aunties of YouTube. I had to take matters into my own hands. Those aunties taught me pretty much everything about techniques and dishes.”
This year, Rahel quit her day job to work full-time on Spoons, her recipe writing and content creation. This, she hopes, will continue to open British minds to the wonders of Indonesian food. “Representations of Indonesian cuisine tend to be really inaccurate. I want to use Spoons to educate larger audiences.
“Neatly summing up Indonesian food is extremely difficult. It’s a country of over 17,000 islands and over 300 ethnicities. The entrepreneurial Minangkabau people have popularised Padang cuisine. You find Padang dishes like beef rendang everywhere, but Javanese cuisine has a sweeter flavour profile, while northern Sumatran dishes often feature a unique, spicy numbing flavour due to andaliman, a spice comparable to Sichuan pepper. Every region’s food is different. “Personally, I’ve never cooked my own Batak ethnicity food here because it uses specific ingredients, such as andaliman, torch ginger [a flower bud] and buffalo milk cheese dali ni horbo, rarely found outside Indonesia. Indonesians are increasingly passionate about this vast food culture, with critics and enthusiasts encouraging people to travel and educate themselves about regional cuisines.
“I grew up in the capital Jakarta and, when I was young, we lived with my grandparents. My granddad placed a lot of importance on
