Words of wisdom from grill master Mr. Castle

Grilling is a very fun and tasty way to prepare food. Throughout our travels we found plenty of coal BBQs and outdoor cooking with wood. In the United States, gas grilling is much more popular and we've been enjoying very flavorful and juicy meals, straight off the grill. But not all food from a grill is, juicy, tender or delicious. So what's the secret?

First things first, buy the right equipment. Look for a gas grill with a high BTU output. Look for about 10,000 BTUs per burner anything lower could jeopardize your grilling experience. Look for a grill with stainless steel components (burners, flavoring bars and grates). This will cost you more initially but will last for ever.

Grilling in Indonesia - coals and low BTUs

Taking care of your grill. 
The best way to clean the grill is with a steel wire brush immediately after you're done grilling your food. Dip the brush in water and brush the grill racks while they're hot. This is very similar to giving your gas grill a steam bath. It gets hot so it is best to wear heat resistant gloves if you want to keep your arm hairs on you. You'll probably keep the grill outside so make sure to get a snug cover for it, it will reduce rust and wear and tear.

For grilling meats, novices will do best by using a meat thermometer. So, here's a quick guide to grilling like a pro -- no more dry, rubbery, un-chewable meats!

Part I.
Chicken

Turn on your grill and turn on your burners on high -- as high as they go (for larger grills you only need to turn on one side). If your grill has a built-in thermometer, check it and you know it is done once it's reached the highest temperature (between 400 and 500 degrees F depending on the grill). Grab your marinated chicken and put it directly on top of the flame. For chicken breasts with bone and skin, put the bone side down first about 3 minutes. Then repeat on the other side. For skinless, boneless breasts, put the convex side down first (this part of the breast has a thin film on it). For non-breast chicken pieces, put them on the grill any way, cooking on high for about 3 minutes on each side.

After cooking on high heat - you can either move the chicken away from the flame or you can leave it in the middle, turning off the middle burners and turning on the laterals. The point is you want the chicken off the direct flame and you want it cooking with an indirect flame.

When is it done? For smaller pieces like drumsticks and thighs, it should take about 15 minutes. It will be done once the meat is tender and coming off the bone (if there are bones). You can open it up a little bit with a knife and make sure there is no pink, the meat should be completely white. For the chicken breast, a grilling thermometer will be your best aide. Once you reach the poultry temperature, you're all set. Once you've grilled enough, you won't even need a thermometer and you can "just tell".

Important tip: once you turn down the flame, close the lid and keep it closed until it's done.

Part II.
Salmon

Perfectly cooked salmon

Heat up grill on the highest setting. Use heavy duty foil and put a little bit of oil on it, placing the foil directly on the rack as the grill heats up so the foil is hot.

Place the salmon on the foil skin side down. If you don't want to use foil, that's fine but the skin might stick to the rack, giving you extra homework during clean-up time. Turn down the heat without moving/relocating the fish and close the cover. Keep an eye on it and when you see white juice oozing to the top of the fish, that means it's done.

Remember: don't flip the salmon, just cook it skin side down with the lid closed!

Part III.
Meat (medium done)

Heat up grill to the maximum temperature. Place steak on the grill, cook one side for about 3 minutes on high heat. After, turn down the temperature to medium high and flip the steak. Leave the steak on top of the flame and do not close the lid for cooking your steak. For medium done steaks, it will be done once juices (blood) start flowing to the top (a meat thermometer can also help you out here).

It's gotta be hot for steaks!

Tip: A very tasty and simple steak marinade is simply adding salt, pepper and a little bit of oil to the steaks just before grilling them. No more, no less.

Part IV.
White fish

Slow and low temp "grilling", Iraqi style

The best way for white fish is to use the French method for steaming. If you place the fish directly on the grill rack, it will probably get stuck and create a mess. Grab yourself two pieces of foil. Place a nice bed of vegetables on the foil so they go underneath the fish. Place the fish on top and then add another layer of vegetables. Use the other piece of foil to put it on top of your fish and veggies. Seal the foil well so that no air escapes and place your foil pouch on the grill.

This whole process should take about 10 minutes and should be cooked on medium high.

Part V.
Pork loin

You'll need an extra tool for this: a meat injector. Also, give yourself a whole day to prep this. Marinade the pork loin by injecting it with your favorite marinade, leave in the fridge over night. Heat up your grill to the ultimate maximum (just like for chicken and meat). Put the loin on the rack once your grill is hot and cook each side for no more than 3 minutes. Once the entire outside is cooked, turned the heat to the lowest setting possible, close the lid and cook for at least 4 or 5 hours (ideal cooking temperature is about 300 degrees F so that it's slightly pink and delicious juicy inside).

I have been very lucky to enjoy wonderfully grilled meals by Mr. Castle for decades now. Thank you dad for these wonderful grilling tips!

Indonesian food is terrible! Or not...

I have to admit it, initially we chose to go to Indonesia not for its spectacular food but rather for its nature and adventure potential. When we were trying to choose which island to focus our travels on, we wanted the path less traveled and Sumatra became a candidate.

Sumatra, beautiful, wild and delicious!

We finally settled on it not just because of adventure but because contrary to all popular belief, Sumatra was supposed to have the best food in all of Indonesia. Could it be true? We figured there's only one way to find out so we booked our ferry and plane tickets to our first destination in Sumatra: Padang.


As a city, Padang is just "meh" and surprisingly expensive. Like $30 dollars for a shared room expensive. Turns out Padang is the launching point to the surfing mecca at the Mentawai islands and prices are hyper inflated. The saving grace for the city is that supposedly, it has the spiciest food in Indonesia. That's definitely something to get really excited about! But wait, it's Ramadan, will there even be anything to eat? Yes. Oh yes there was.

We got the impression that Muslims in Padang are pretty chill about the whole Ramadan thing as we saw hoards of them 'cheating' and eating throughout the day. Good news for us! Our first stop was a coconut stand on the side of the road prior to arriving at our hotel. After a long flight, a nice juicy coconut was exactly what we needed.

Pile on the goodies please!

We then walked over to one of the best restaurants in Padang (according to our guesthouse) and just drooled as the waitstaff piled plate after plate of all sorts of dishes all smothered in bright red hot chilies: braised tofu, beef, potatoes, fish, dry beef, curry beef, yellow chicken, saucy chicken, silken tofu, eggplant and boiled eggs among many, many others. This amazing dish pile is apparently called Nasi Padang. YUM!

Similar to Ethiopia, the custom in Padang is just to dig in with your hands and enjoy. We didn't realize that you don't really get to "order" your food, instead they just pile it on and you ask them to take away the reject plates. Naturally, we just tried eating everything on the table until we were stuffed beyond belief. The favorite was definitely the Beef Rendang, tender chunks of beef cooked in a toasted coconut sauce. We tried ordering more of it but they had just run out and the three of us nearly fought over the last little piece. A close second was a deep fried spicy fish that felt more like fish jerky but was so crisp that you could even eat all the bones.

Roll up your sleeves, and scoop it all up (crispy fish @ 10 o'clock, the last of the beef Rendang at 5 o'clock)

We only ended up staying in Padang for a short day and decided to hit up the dinner spot once more for lunch before heading out to the airport. At 1pm, the place was packed with locals and there was even a live band playing. You wouldn't have known it because the whole city looks like it shuts down between sunrise and sunset but luckily for us, the restaurant was definitely open, you just had to know to pull away the curtain and slip in through the very narrow entrance. Apparently in Padang, not even Ramadan stops people from eating and given how delightful the food was, it's no wonder!!

Got chilies?

So Padang was kind of a bust but from a foodie perspective, it was definitely worth the visit! Plus I was able to find a fruit I thought only Colombians had, tomate de arbol. I ordered it as a fresh fruit juice from this little old lady who couldn't believe I didn't want any sugar in my juice. It was delicious, just like the Colombian version and I was in heaven! I was also very glad I didn't get any sugar in it: apparently Indonesians have one of the highest per capita consumption of sugar in all of Asia. Watch out for spikes in diabetes, Indonesia!  [China, by the way, is the #1 in Asia and India is the top consumer in the world]

[Note: I found this nice blog where you can read much more about Padang cuisine. This blogger had a bit more time to explore the food options than we did: http://afastar.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/west-sumatera-cuisine/]

Best way to end a meal: fresh fruit and coconut

While Padang was quite the exciting food city, we were shocked to discover one of Sumatra's best kept culinary secrets: the Batak people in Lake Toba are food geniuses!! One of my good travel buddies from Spain even commented how she does not like Indonesian food at all but Batak food was really good!

I think one of the tricks to this simple but delicious food is the lake itself. Lake Toba, a few hours west of Medan, is a gem of a place. The depth of the lake (almost 1 kilometer!) helps to keep the water clean and is home to delicious fish. We walked into a small hole-in-the wall restaurant for a late lunch, hoping they would serve us food. They were happy to have us and we all decided to order their fried fish. As is typical in most developing countries, our fish was deep fried whole and served with some veggie garnishes. We weren't expecting much but as soon as we took the first bite, we looked at each other all wide-eyed and almost simultaneously went "mmmmmmm!!!!!!!!"

One word: succulent!

The fish had definitely just been caught that morning and our hosts clearly knew what they were doing because it wasn't that greasy, which probably means they heat up the oil just right: even the tail was crunchy enough to eat it all! As a Colombian, deep fried whole fish is just one of those things you grow up with and the ability to eat the tail of the fish so that it feels like a potato chip is a true sign of excellence in the kitchen (my dad taught me this when I was probably 5 years old).

Best BBQ fish in town

Anyway, "Shugary Restaurant" is a must if you ever find yourself in Tuk Tuk. The fried fish was topped by our chef's dinner the next day: slow cooked whole fish on the barbecue. The chef made a little BBQ brush out of lemongrass he used to keep the fish moist with home-made marinade as it cooked for almost an hour. His wife fixes a great veggie salad (with cheese!) and she makes toasted coconut from scratch, which she then uses to top off a fruit salad with passion fruit.

Shredding coconut is a very laborious process and actually a great arm work out. My friend Jamie and I took a cooking class in Tuk Tuk and we had a first hand experience on how tiring this process is! But, regardless, making things from scratch is probably the other secret to Batak cuisine.

A coconut grinder really helps to get all that meat out

We learned to make sambal (like a chili paste) from scratch without the use of any electronic devices: we used a good ol' round stone and stone tablet to grind chili, garlic and shallot into a deliciously spicy paste. I learned to wrap fish in banana leaves to trap all the flavor and moisture as it steams. We also used heaps of the ground coconut to make our own coconut milk and used a mortar and pestle to make a coconut paste we used for a chicken Rendang. Similar to beef Rendang, we coated pieces of chicken in a toasted coconut paste and slowly cooked them until tender perfection!

Banana leaves keep the fish nice and moist

All in all, Batak cuisine was simple, yet flavorful, fresh and cooked with tender loving care. As an added bonus, the Batak eat a lot of pork and although it wasn't the best pork I had ever had, my tastebuds happily welcomed the change and made me long for bacon...

TLC @ Shugary

Shugary's delicious toasted coconut fruit and home-made muesli with passion fruit

What do you do with all that ground coconut? Make coconut milk, of course!

Mortar and pestle for Rendang dishes

Making chili sambal like a cavewoman

Tropical intrigue

Hard at work in paradise

Our first mistake was to fly from Colombo to Maldives on the first Friday of Ramadan. Maldivians take their religion seriously and not only is there no food for sale anywhere during the day but no ferries run between the islands either. For a country made up of thousands of tiny coral atolls that's a serious transportation challenge. We were forced to stay in the capital city of Male, a tiny island where skyscrapers appear to jut straight out of the sea.

Going fishing

Gone fishing

Luckily we met a friendly local who invited us to join his family on a night fishing trip to celebrate the first Friday of Ramadan. We cruised out under cover of darkness and fished by throwing hooked lines over the side of the boat and hauling them back in with gloved hands. Everyone caught a number of fish and we even dragged up a few eels (don't worry, we threw them back). For our first time fishing, we were amazed we managed to catch anything!

Our local friend has political ambitions to become the senator for island where he was born. Recent Maldivian political history is a veritable soap opera of tropical intrigue. A very popular young opposition candidate ousted the longtime incumbent from the presidency a couple of years ago. He had big ideas for changing the country, opening up the tourism sector and developing the outlying atolls. But the incumbent wasn't happy losing his throne and organized a coup with the help of the Male police. Our friend was actually alongside the young president during the coup and was on the front-lines of the subsequent riots between police and angry constituents.

No sex scandals for this little guy

A new election was about to take place when we were there and tensions were running high. A non-stop series of incidents have rattled the political scene, from complex corruption schemes to high justices involved in sex scandals (especially big news during Ramadan!).

Luckily we were able to escape the embroiled capital unscathed to the beautiful island of Maafushi. Maldives is best known for its massive, five star, all inclusive resorts. But those were far beyond the reaches of our modest pocketbook. Luckily over the past few years the country legalized 'local guest houses' (thanks to the ousted young president). These are the equivalent of a nice budget hotel in the US. They had relatively spacious rooms with AC and all the amenities but without the attached resort.

We both felt like this after the Maldives

We spent our week there relaxing on the snow white beaches (a different shade of white compared to Zanzibar), swimming in the perfect turquoise water and diving pristine coral reefs. The marine life is in exquisite condition and residents are very aware of its importance to the local economy so they keep it well protected. There was no shortage of sharks, turtles, napoleon fish, sweetlips, eels and of course, plenty of Nemos. We munched on fresh seafood in the evenings and slurped down coconuts throughout the day (well hidden from the prying eyes of Ramadan of course). Though the coconuts were sub-par compared to Sri Lanka's King Coconuts, they still did the job and kept us well hydrated throughout the hot, hot days.

It was a wonderful week, all the more so because a week is the perfect amount of time to spend there. It's a great place for a short-term holiday. But our ambitions ran beyond the scope of a short-term holiday, we had our sights set on the smoldering volcanoes, verdant jungles and deserted beaches of Sumatra...


Co-posted on www.dreacastillo.com

Can't complain

Island life

On our way to unspoiled reefs

Shade on the Indian Ocean

Our home for a week