Last updated on January 1, 2019
Contributed and posted by ‘The Indonesian Way’, a textbook for the Indonesian language by George Quinn and Uli Kozok.
Indonesian kitchen are often very different from European kitchen. Indonesians typically only use a very few pots and pans, the most prominent being the woq, which is called kuali, or, in Java, wajan. Ovens are virtually unknown and so are electric stoves. Instead all cooking is done using a gas stove (kompor gas) or a kerosene stove (kompor minyak). Indonesian cooking tends tio be smelly and irritating. The fumes generated by frying of chili pepper are highly irritating to the respiratory tract, and shrimp paste (known as belacan or trasi), which is usually fried or roasted before being used, releases an incredible pungent smell. Other food items with a strong odour are petai beans (parcia speciosa), salted fish (ikan asin), and the durian fruit. Some dishes, such as rendang for instance, require cooking times of several hours. It is hence understandable that these food items are better prepared at a certain distance from the living quarters and in a well-aired space.
Besides these traditional kitchen one often finds, especially in middle-class households, western-style kitchen that in many cases are mainly used for representative purposes only. These representative kitchen are called dapur kering (literally dry kitchen), whereas the kitchen wehre the real cooking is done, is called the dapur basah. Simple houses have, of course, only one kitchen, and in this case it is just simply called dapur.