Most Famous food in Indonesia

On first place, we are going to start with the one considered the national dish of Indonesia, it´s known as Nasi Goreng, but you will easily recognise it as Indonesian fried rice.

Calling it by fried rice may be too simple, but this popular Indonesian dish is actually famous for having a very intense flavour. It´s served with many spices, fried egg, vegetables, kerupuk and chilli sauce.

A very interesting fact about this Indonesian food is that it was originally made to avoid throwing away the leftover rice, and that´s why you won´t be surprised if you find out that they eat it for breakfast.

Another very common food in Indonesia is the Satay, which is basically a meat skewer cooked in a very different way than the one we are normally used to do it.

The Satay is generally cooked over coals, and it´s served with rice and garnished all over with a peanut sauce. It´s also recognised as one of the 5 national dishes of Indonesia.

As soon as you travel to Indonesia, you will see that they eat all over the country as it is the most authentic Indonesian street food. It´s cheap and delicious, so you won´t have any excuse for not trying it.

If you are visiting Indonesia and you want to try one of their most luxury dishes, we would advice you to try their Sop Buntut or also known as the Indonesian Oxtail Soup.

The recipe of this traditional food of Indonesia is a combination of frying the oxtail and mixing it with a soup of vegetables (tomato, carrot and potatoes normally work well on this dish).

The locals love this famous food in Indonesia as it is very healthy, but you should also know that it´s very heavy and you will get full quickly.

If you are a big fan of Indonesian street food, you will love the Siomay. As it happens with many other street foods of Indonesia, the Siomay is also served with a peanut sauce (Locals love it)

This must try Indonesian food is a fish (or shrimp) dumpling normally steamed with potato, egg, and cabbage, and as we said it is very common in the street markets.

 The Siomay is a version of the Chinese dim sum, and actually its origins are in China, but they have made their own version in Indonesia.

We don´t know why Indonesian love spicy food so much, but the truth is that all of the cultural foods of Indonesia are a bit hot.

Imagine how crazy is the spicy Indonesian food that they don´t only have spicy noodles or rice, they also use spicy condiments for chicken and fish!

The rica-rica is a spice mixture used in chicken, meat and fish, just so you can have an idea of how hot it is, the word rica is used when something is very spicy. Anyway, unless you can´t deal at all with spicy food, we still recommend you trying it as it´s a delicious sauce. Rica-rice, is usually considered an indonesian main dish.

Gudeg is an Indonesian stew and a very popular recipe from the province of Yogyakarta, well, actually, is their national dish.

The stew´s main ingredient is the jackfruit, and it´s the reason why the Gudeg is so sweet. Other than the Jackfruit, this typical Indonesian food is also made with coconut milk, palm sugar and some other spices from the area

If you have the chance of trying it, we truly advice you to do it. This food is very hard to make and you will need to be patient if you are going to try to make it at home.

They can be confused with the Chinese spring rolls or even with the French crepes, they are known as Lumpia and it´s a traditional food from Indonesia and the Philippines.

The lumpia is made with a crepe-style pastry named lumpia wrapper which has some sweet and savoury flavour.

You can either eat this famous Indonesian food as a snack, main course or even as a dessert if you decide to put some sweet ingredients inside. It can be eaten either fresh or fried.

Have you ever heard of the Tempeh? The tempeh has become an international food all over the world, but it was first known in Indonesia, more concrete in the island of Java, where it´s very popular.

The tempeh is basically an Indonesian soy product, and it´s made from fermented soybeans. After a fermentation process, the beans end up having a cake form. They use a special fungus called tempeh starter.

There is one Indonesian dish made with tempeh that you must tr, it´s the tempeh kecap, which is based on frying the tempeh and mixing it with the kecap spicy sauce.

Although it´s not one of the most popular Indonesian dishes, it´s becoming very famous in many countries of southeast Asia. Yes, we are talking about the Snake fruit, which it has a weird and different taste, but once you start eating it, it will be hard to stop.

The snake fruit is known that way because of its shape and texture, as you can see in the picture, is very similar to the skin of the snake. It´s actual name is Salak or Salacca Zalacca.

You will find this Indonesian famous food in almost every street food market, but let us give you one tip, do buy them and try them, but don´t eat many of them at the same time because it can be bad for your stomach.

We are finishing this list with one of the most popular foods of Indonesia, the Randang, a famous dish traditional from Padang, a city located in the island of Sumatra.

The Radang is a beef dish very similar to the beef curry but without the broth, it has a very rich flavour and it´s a little bit spicy as well.

Indonesian people love this meal because it takes a lot of time to get to the perfect level of tenderness from the beef and they don´t have it much often. We advise you to try it.

On our list, we have only mentioned one of the 5 national dishes of indonesia. That´s right, although many people talk about Nasi Goreng as the one and only indonesian national dish, the truth is that there are four more.

Not a long time ago, in 2018 the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy decided to choose the national foods of Indonesia, and those were: rendang, soto, satay, nasi goreng, and gado-gado.

The first fact about Indonesian food is about its spiciness. As you have already seen on the dishes we mentioned you before, a majority of them are somehow spicy, but why is that?

Indonesian food is rich in flavour and spices, they love to add spices to every dish and many of them are hot, so they are now use to it and they always ask for more.

Don´t believe them if they tell you that a dish is not spicy, because their tongue is way more use to it than what you can imagine. If you are trying to avoid spicy food, don´t try dishes that contain “rica2”, the foods with its name finishing in “balado” and of course, do not ever try the nasi tempong.

That´s right, we spent 9 days in Indonesia, and we ate rice every single day, and sometimes twice per day. The use of rice in Indonesia is as common as the use of bread in Spain.

Imagine how popular is rice, that there is a goddess of rice! It´s known as Dewi Sri and is very popular in Bali, maybe it´s the actual reason why they have rice on every meal?

Indonesian locals are already used to eat all the original Chinese dishes, that´s why they may never recognise that those foods are not traditional from Indonesia, but from China.

The truth is that a great number of Chinese immigrants decided to move to Indonesia and live their lives there. They brought with them their original recipes like the bakso meatballs, the bakmi, or even the popular siomay.

Therefore, many of the traditional indonesian food recipes are original from China. With time they have evolved and now are a bit different from the original Chinese foods.

Last of all, if you want to know what is to have an authentic Indonesian food experience, you must know that eating together (with family, friends, partners…) is something they do every day and it´s a tradition they always respect.

Although younger people do it less often, you will find that a majority of Indonesian locals would meet together to share food and portions of different dishes.