Anthony Bourdain loved it: where to eat the best spit-roasted pork in Bali and why the chef called it ‘the best pig I have ever had’
- ‘Babi guling’ is what Balinese call spit-roasted pig, a dish the late food legend Anthony Bourdain rated as the most succulent pork he had ever tasted
- Chefs reveal what makes Bali’s version world-renowned, from the spice paste smeared on the pig to the flavour and mouth feel of the different cuts of meat
At 1am, when the only sound that can be heard in the village of Pengayehan, on Bali’s west coast, is a dog barking, Adik Dika walks towards his pig with an eight-inch (20cm) knife in his hand.
The animal squeals as he cuts its throat before draining the blood into a bucket he will later use to make one of the world’s most unusual salads.
He will then spend hour upon hour turning it on a spit while basting it with a blend of coconut oil and turmeric until the skin turns golden brown and becomes as crisp as peeling paint.
“This is the best pig I have ever had. Absolutely the best,” Bourdain said while filming in Bali, in Indonesia, in 2006. “You think even the finest French chef could ever come up with anything as delicious or as beautiful as this?”
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The art of spit-roasting whole animals dates back to the Stone Age – a primal ritual rife with spiritual and religious connotations that is still practised in many parts of the world today.
In Cuba and the Philippines, roast pigs are an immutable part of Christmas. In Melanesia and the South Pacific, the sacrifice and roasting of pigs are used to cement marriages and peace accords between tribes.
But Bali is the only place in the world where the ancient tradition has evolved into a world-renowned cuisine.
“The history of babi guling is not written but the practice of roasting pigs for Hindu rituals has become Bali’s most well-known dish,” says William Wongso, one of Indonesia’s most respected chefs.
“When I was growing up in the ’60s, my family was very poor. We only ate rice and vegetables,” Bloem recalls. “But later on, my mother started cooking babi guling in our home. She would wake up at midnight and roast all night.
“At sunrise, her sisters would come and help her make 200 or 300 portions of nasi bungkus [rice packs wrapped in banana leaves] with babi guling to sell them in the market. I was very happy because suddenly my life became full of meat.”
In 1972, Bloem’s mother opened a babi guling warung – the Indonesian word for a family-run eatery – in Bali’s capital, Denpasar. In the 1980s, an aunt opened a warung of her own on the same block.
The history of babi guling is not written but the practice of roasting pigs for Hindu rituals has become Bali’s most well-known dish
“The family never competed against each other because everyone’s babi guling tasted different and they all had different customers,” he says.
Bloem reckons the recipe for babi guling could be more than 1,000 years old. “I believe it was eaten during the ceremonies of the Majapahit Kingdom [13th-16th centuries] and probably before that, too.”
“My mother told me that when she was a little girl, her mother would help make babi guling for the big cruise ships,” Bloem says.
In the mid-60s, a lady called Ibu Oka (Madame Oka) began selling babi guling rice packages to tourists at Ubud’s famous wet market.
“Until then, you couldn’t buy it as you can now unless you went to a babi guling specialist and ordered a whole pig,” says Ketut Suardana, co-owner of Casa Luna restaurant and cooking school in Ubud. “Ibu Oka changed everything.”
By 1990, Ibu Oka had saved enough to open a warung in a lane behind Ubud’s Royal Palace. It was an instant hit and after Bourdain visited and sang its praises in 2006, thousands followed in his footsteps. It proved a godsend for the family but disastrous for their loyal customers.
“You could see the look of defeat on the waiters’ faces; they were overworked and struggling just to find places to seat customers. Bourdain ruined Ibu Oka,” opines Nick Kasli, a Balinese event planner who is so obsessed with babi guling that one time, when he broke his jaw, he blended a portion so he could drink it through a straw.
Now back onto solids, Kasli is documenting his quest to try every babi guling in Bali on the Instagram account @BabiGulingChampion.
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Wongso says there is nothing special about Ibu Oka; and that the restaurant was simply around at the right time and in the right place during Bourdain’s visit to Indonesia.
“The tourists and bloggers love Ibu Oka,” he says. “But there are better babi guling restaurants in Bali. One of my favourites is Slingsing.”
“My aunt had a small warung in a village north of here. But when she got married, she opened this place in 1999,” says Slingsing’s manager, Ibu Pajar.
Set in an old warehouse at the end of a lane, Slingsing is as rustic as a warung can get. The tables are covered in plastic sheets, the floor in grime and the walls in soot. The kitchen is filthy and could pass for a set in Game of Thrones.
I see a woman making sausages from a bucket of blood and guts, and a man roasting a pig over an open fire with only a sheet of plaster wood to protect him from the heat.
Piles of dirty pots and pans stretch towards the ceiling while the squeals of doomed pigs spending their last night on Earth in the kitchen add an element of the macabre.
In Madrid, I had suckling pig. The skin was crisp and crunchy and the meat was soft and white. But compared to babi guling, it had no flavour
But the aesthetics are of no consequence, Bloem says: “The way Indonesians and Westerners see warungs is totally different. Often they are unhygienic but the food is amazing.
“Someone in Ubud recently opened a babi guling restaurant for the tourist market. It’s spotless but the food is terrible.”
How many people eat here each day? “I don’t know but we’re always busy,” says Ibu Pajar. “Why? I think people love our babi guling because of my aunt’s secret recipe for bumbu.”
“In Madrid, I had suckling pig,” says Bloem. “The skin was crisp and crunchy and the meat was soft and white. But compared to babi guling, it had no flavour because they don’t use bumbu over there.”
At Slingsing I am shown four kinds of bumbu: one for pigs, another for broth and a third to make lawar, a traditional salad of shredded papaya, long beans and raw pig’s blood.
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I take his advice and pass on the blood lawar – along with the blood sausage and deep-fried stomach parts. But I still end up with more than half a dozen elements on my plate – white belly meat, crunchy refried brown meat from the animal’s leg, pig skin, rice, chilli paste, a bowl of turmeric-tinted bone broth and ordinary lawar salad.
It is this variation of elements that makes babi guling so different from all other spit-roast dinners in the world and gives restaurateurs in Bali an opportunity to create real points of difference. “The most elements I have ever seen on a plate of babi guling is 13,” says Kasli.
So how does it taste?
The soup is hot and spicy but not worth writing home about. The crackling splinters against my teeth and fills my mouth with artery-clogging goodness, while the lawar strikes a fresh and earthy counterbalance. But it is the melt-in-the-mouth white belly meat, deeply infused with bumbu, that stands out.
It is not spicy like the soup but aromatic, tangy and sweet.
Before my investigation wraps up, I visit half a dozen other babi guling restaurants. My favourite is Babi Guling Men Lari, an open-air venue with dreamy rice-field views and two elements I have not tasted anywhere before – minced pork satay sticks turbocharged with flavour and super-crunchy pork skin chips.
“Who makes the best babi guling?” asks Kalsi. “That’s the question on everyone’s mind and every Balinese will give you a different answer. But the one true answer is whichever one is closest to you because it’s all about the freshness. The sooner you can get babi guling after it’s cooked, the better.”
