Hello There, Welcome To My Taco Tuesdays POST
Ok as usual, My #Taco-Tuesdays post on #freecompliments is about food from my country, Indonesia. This time I am picking one of controversial food here, it is famous but it is not well spoken. The Food I am talking about is BPK.
BPK stands for BABI (pork) Panggang (Grill) Karo. It is pork for sure. Indonesia is the largest Muslim population country, and Muslim or people who hold Islam as their religion, do not eat pork.
However not all part of Indonesia have Islam or Muslim as their majority, some of them are dominated by other Religion, for example Hindu is the majority Religion in Bali. Karo is a region in North Sumatera, and majority of them are Christian. So they have some pork dishes as their signature cuisine and today I am sharing their grilled pork.
How I Pick This BPK
It was last week and I had problem with my smartphone. I was not in a good condition so I was not willing to spend time and efforts to fix it my self. I decided to go to the nearest gadget-focused shopping mall.
The problem was someone hacked my phone, making it kept playing video apps every 20 seconds. My Bit Defender apps could not block it and most people told me to do factory setting reset except that guy. He did some clean up manually for 2 minutes, then restarted the phone, did clean up again, then kept repeating the cycle for 3 times.
After 10 minutes for that 3 cycle, my phone was fixed. No more god damn annoying apps. He did not ask for payment, but I decided to give him $2... was I being so stingy there?
Before I got back to office, I decided to take a lunch there. Luckily I got a good seat there, in the corner which none could see it. I could not take any shots around because the place was full of people.
You see, I used to come to one of the building there because I had a gym membership there. Right now I did not go there anymore because I could not afford the fee. Well this view gave me a lot of flashback on old days when I still lived normally as a middle class people in Jakarta.
The place was crowded and I hated to stand in queue, so I was looking around checking for the empty one or the shortest queue one. That's how I ended on BPK stall. I saw only a person was queuing there so I joined in too.
The price was cheap for a food court meal. Even you do not know Bahasa Indonesia, I think you can get a picture what that menu is telling us about.
I ordered Package A, 55K IDR or around 3,4 USD
They would give me Rice, regular size grilled pork, a soup, cassave leaves (sayur singkong), and chili sauce (sambal).
I was thinking about ordering package B, which was a jumbo size. Usually when a restaurant put this kind of menu, which has the jumbo or large portion... the regular portion is served in a small portion and it make people, usually male, feel scammed because they don't get full at all.
But I decided to go with package A.
My Order - BPK
Finally my order arrived, I added a bottle of sweet tea, called Teh Botol, one of the best selling tea in Indonesia.
I was very surprised with the package, because it was on a good portion, not too small which most stall or restaurants would do. $4 for this portion was actually a big bargain, a great steal!!
This was their soup, a pork rib soup. The taste was quite good, not special one but from beginning I did not hope something great from the soup. In fact I was expecting the soup was a plain one, just a broth to enrich your rice taste.
This was the main one, Grilled Pork. They put the pork above, and some veggie below it. Ok let me show you what below those grilled pork.
We had that cassava leaves hidden below. The cassave leaves tasted very good, I meant seriously very good. It blended well with the taste of the soup, which I never expected that before. I was very happy that today BPK gave me a couple of surprise, which were good ones.
Ok now the sambal part, Sambal is Indonesian name for chili sauce. However there is a fun fact here, those two actually are not chili at all.
Let's start with the green one, people call it sambal Andaliman. Andaliman is a very small fruits, and their seeds give you a spicy taste like a white peppers. So the green one is not from green chili or green peppers at all. It's an andaliman, a small fruits less than 1cm diameter size.
Now the dark brownish one, we call this Sambal Gota. Yes every sauce that give you spicy taste, we call it sambal. Sambal Gota is made from blood, yes it can be pork blood, chicken blood, or some places use Dog Blood.
Usually they keep the blood of the animal or livestock they want to cook, and mix the blood with some peppers, onion, shallots and add some hot peppers to make Sambal Gota.
Some people avoid eating sambel Gota because of that Blood as its main ingredient. I should avoid that one too regarding I was not in good condition, but I had not eaten that for more than a year, so yeah... I ignored my condition and ate with it.
Overall, that BPK or Karo Grilled Pork was a good one. The price was great, less than $4 in a shopping mall was definitely a bargain. The overall taste was good too.
Ok, That's all for my Taco Tuesdays post today/ Thank you for reading my post and feel free to leave any comments below as you please.