Indonesia Food Collection

Indonesia is an archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands, and its kitchen behaves accordingly: Sumatra cooks with chilli, coconut milk and long, patient reductions; Java leans sweeter, with palm sugar and soy; Bali cooks with ritual and whole roasted spice pastes; Sulawesi and Maluku turn to grilled fish, lime and burning-hot dabu-dabu.

What holds it together is bumbu — the wet spice paste of shallot, garlic, candlenut, turmeric, galangal and chilli ground in a stone mortar and fried until the raw edge disappears. Almost every Indonesian dish begins there, and the smell of bumbu hitting hot oil is the sound of dinner starting.

Rice is not a side dish in Indonesia; it is the meal, and everything else exists to season it. A plate of nasi putih is surrounded by small quantities of many things — a piece of fried chicken, tempeh in sweet soy, blanched greens with peanut sauce, a spoonful of curry — so that each mouthful can be composed differently.

Sambal is the punctuation. There are hundreds of versions: sambal terasi with fermented shrimp paste, sambal matah with raw shallot and lemongrass, sambal ijo made from green chillies. A table without sambal feels unfinished, and most families keep a favourite recipe that is quietly considered the correct one.

Rendang, from the Minangkabau kitchens of West Sumatra, is the country's slowest dish: beef simmered in coconut milk and spice paste for hours until the liquid disappears entirely and the meat darkens, caramelises and turns almost dry. It was made to travel, and it keeps for days.

Alongside it: nasi goreng fried with sweet kecap manis and topped with a fried egg, sate ayam turned over coconut-husk charcoal and dressed in peanut sauce, soto ayam bright with turmeric, gado-gado dressed in peanut sauce, bakso meatballs in clear broth, and gudeg — Yogyakarta's jackfruit stew, cooked overnight until it turns russet-brown.

Daily eating happens at the warung — a small family kitchen with a handful of plastic stools — and from the kaki lima carts that move through neighbourhoods announcing themselves by sound. Martabak is folded and griddled to order, pisang goreng fried until the banana collapses, krupuk crackers snapped over everything.

Sweetness arrives cold: es cendol with pandan jelly, coconut milk and palm sugar; es doger pink with fermented rice and syrup; teh botol drunk sweet and chilled. Coffee is kopi tubruk — grounds poured straight into the glass and left to settle, strong enough to hold the whole afternoon.

Our Indonesia collection gathers the dishes that define that abundance — nasi goreng, rendang, sate ayam, gado-gado, bakso, martabak, es cendol and kopi tubruk — into one illustrated composition drawn with the colour and generosity of the Indonesian table.

Every Indonesia piece is printed and shipped through our Etsy shop: posters, aprons, blankets, tote bags, t-shirts, sweatshirts and baby onesies for anyone who grinds their own bumbu, keeps sambal within reach, or misses the smell of a warung at dusk.