Tomato blessing

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Fresh tomatoes

Fresh tomatoes

Our fertile lands at Jiwa Damai produce delicious tomatoes.

Since we can not eat all these tomatoes at once, we regularly process them into other products.

We use our fresh tomatoes to make Balinese Sambal. We already shared our recipe for original Balinese Sambal in one of our older posts. Click here to read the post.

The sambal is cooked and then filled into plastic bags, sealed and frozen.

Balinese sambal

Balinese sambal

Another option is to dry the tomatoes (with our raw food oven). This is an excellent method to conserve fruit and vegetables.

Dried tomatoes

Dried tomatoes

Organic Cooking: Balinese Sambal

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At Jiwa Damai we place a high value on sustainable food practices and organically grown produce. We grow and eat a fair amount from our permaculture garden. Astri, our very talented Balinese cook, prepares food with great care and love. We eat mostly traditional Balinese dishes here.

In this blog, we want to share some of Astri’s amazing recipes with you. We start with a very important dish in the Balinese cuisine - Sambal.

Ingredients for one batch:

  • 5 to 6 cloves of garlic, chopped
  • 5 to 6 little red onions, minced
  • Spicy: 3 red chilies, Mild: 1 red chili
  • 7 medium sized tomatoes
  • ½ block veggie stock (homemade is best)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon of sugar
Tomatoes

Tomatoes

Preparation:

Peel and chop garlic, red onion, tomatoes and chilies. Combine in medium mixing bowl.

Heat skillet with around 3 tablespoons of oil. Add ingredients and allow to simmer. Stir occasionally, reducing the tomatoes down. Add the teaspoon of salt, continue to reduce until tomatoes are soft and juicy.

Remove from heat, add veggie stock and sugar. Put ingredients into blender, run until smooth. Most of the time at Jiwa Damai, we eat sambal with tempe and rice. It makes a delicious addition, however, to cooked vegetables or eggs.

Cooking Sambal

Cooking Sambal

Note: There are many variations of sambal in Indonesia, used both as a sauce, a dip and a regular table condiment. Variations include those with Kaffir lime, peanuts, or shrimp paste.