TO JAKARTA FOR DURIAN

Sri Owen ,  WEEKENDER   |  Fri, 07/31/2009 8:27 PM  |  Letter From London

Outside your own food comfort zone there are always lures, havens and challenges. The havens are things that have been familiar since childhood: In the case of Indonesian food, encountered by the first-time visitor, these can be bananas, pineapples or whatever may surprise your palate by being so much fresher and tastier than you remembered it at home.

Havens are unexciting but safe: plain boiled rice, or roast chicken. But the poetry of alien food lies in its challenges. Chilies, for example – we all like something “hot i’ the mouth”, as Sir Toby Belch said of ginger, but can you, dare you, bite on a fresh chili, knowing that it’s going to set your tongue and throat on fire? Or put in your mouth things you weren’t brought up to regard as food at all, like sago grubs or deep-fried crickets?

Chilies are everywhere now, and you aren’t in fact likely to encounter bugs and bats unless you actually seek them out. But all visitors to Indonesia and neighboring countries sooner or later encounters one great challenge, part legend, part joke, that they know will place them forever on one side or other of the line that divides humankind into two classes: durian lovers and durian haters.

The durian certainly looks like one of nature’s strangest fancies. I don’t need to describe, to any likely reader, either its appearance or its smell. The great 17th-century German naturalist, Rumpf – Rumphius of Ambon – first named it, for his scientific colleagues’ benefit, Echinus arboreus, “tree hedgehog”. Later savants retitled it Durio zibethinus, from the Indonesian word duri, a thorn, though the thorns are not on the tree, but on the fruit.

They also placed it in the family of the Bombacaceae, whose first syllable seems an excellent description of the fruit’s appearance and its habit, when fully ripe, of falling from a great height onto the ground below, there to shatter and waft its penetrating odor through the forest. Large animals – tigers, for example – cannot resist this, and it is they who, by eating the flesh-wrapped seeds, which pass through the animal’s gut undigested, help the durian to multiply and evolve. Nowadays, of course, there is not a great deal of forest left, and very few tigers, but the durian’s future is assured; durian lovers will never let it go extinct.

My early years were spent among the hills and woods of West Sumatra, so durian for me was just another item on the list of good things to eat that came from our generous earth. As a teenager and student I lived in towns in Central Java, where my friends and I eagerly awaited the coming of the durian season and became expert in choosing fruit with just the right degree of ripeness, not an easy trick when that delicious aromatic pulp is concealed by such heavy armor. It occurs to me now that the thick skin also protects the flesh from bruising as it’s transported, and perhaps insulates it a little from overheating in direct sunlight. A friend demonstrated to me, while driving along the coast road from Cirebon in West Java to Jakarta, how to split open a ripe durian by putting it next to the clutch pedal and stamping on it – but he was a military man and had suitably heavy footwear; I don’t recommend trying this in flip-flops, or indeed in modern traffic conditions.

On visits to Jakarta over the past 20-odd years I’ve enjoyed many expeditions, with family members and friends, to buy durian in food markets and at street stalls, and we have enjoyed the feast afterwards, sometimes indulging in shameless competitive orgies to see who can eat the most. All sorts of stories are told about durian, in particular that it can have dire effects if you drink alcohol after eating it, and there is I think some substance in the belief that gorging on the fruit can produce a durian “high”, to be followed of course by the inevitable hangover.

Try Googling “chemical composition of durian” (in quotes, so it searches for the whole phrase). For me, it comes up with just nine hits, of which only the first concerns the edible pulp. It doesn’t reach any clear conclusion, largely (it seems) because there are so many genetic differences between durian trees; indeed, each individual tree may, I suspect, be unique.

Alas, hands-on durian “research” is a treat I can rarely indulge in while I live in London. Good-quality Thai durians are flown in, during their season, on the weekly cargo flights that bring supplies to Thai shops and restaurants; these are usually cultivars that are relatively thin-skinned and with small seeds, but they are still heavy, and the price per kilo is high because the demand for them is so great.

Some years ago I was invited to take part in a conference in Cardiff, in south Wales, on “food and the performing arts”, with a request that I should bring with me some startling and mind-bending food from Southeast Asia for the delegates to sample. At short notice, and with minimal hesitation, I decided that durian ice cream might be a new experience for most of them, but as even my own two sons won’t eat it I was a little nervous. I managed to buy enough Thai durian pulp to make three liters, quite expecting (perhaps hoping) that I would have to eat most of it myself, sharing with Roger, who dislikes the custardy durian pulp, but enjoys the aroma and is very fond of the ice cream.

In fact, there were more people at the opening session of that enjoyable though eccentric conference than anyone had expected, and we served each delegate about four good spoonfuls. The ice cream was rapturously received and I was besieged with requests for more, or at least for the recipe. Readers of the WEEKENDER should at least have no difficulty in finding the durian. Good dairy cream might have been a problem 30 years ago, but not, I think, today. However, I must tell you, dear readers, that durian ice cream can also be made using very thick coconut milk, or as we call it in Indonesia santan kenta – preferably of course the santan that is made from freshly grated kelapa setengah tua. Also in a book of mine, Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food, there is another ice cream recipe, using coconut milk (or double cream) and avocado. But here is how I make my delicious durian ice cream.


DURIAN ICE CREAM

To make 1 liter:

4 or 5 durian seeds, with the custardy creamy pulp

600 ml double cream (heavy cream)

300 ml full-cream milk

1 tablespoon icing sugar

Remove and discard the durian seeds. Purée the flesh and the other ingredients in a blender. Pour this mixture into a sorbetière or ice-cream maker, and churn it, in accordance with the manufacturer’s instructions, until it starts to freeze on the sides of the machine. Transfer it to a freezer-proof container, and keep in the freezer until required.

If you don’t have an ice-cream maker, proceed as follows. Put the durian purée in just the right size of freezer-proof plastic box, and place it in the freezer for 2 hours. Then pour the contents into a large glass bowl, and with a large metal spoon vigorously mix this already slushy mixture until it is blended smoothly. Return it to the plastic container, and keep in the freezer until required.

Whichever method you use, remember the ice cream must have time to soften a little before you serve it. Move it, in its container, from the freezer to the refrigerator 40–60 minutes before it comes to table.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.