Where To Go......

Where To Go......

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Best of Indonesian Food (Soto)

Soto ayam or chicken soto. Note the transparent yellow broth, the emping and fried shallot

Soto, sroto, tauto or coto is a common dish to be found in various regional variations of Indonesian cuisine. It is a traditional soup mainly composed of broth, meat and vegetables. There is no clear definition what makes a soto, but normally all traditional soups are called soto, while western/foreign influenced soups are called sop.
Ingredients
The meats that are most commonly used are chicken and beef, but there are also variations with offal, mutton, water buffalo meat and pork. The soup is usually accompanied by rice or compressed rice cakes (ketupat or buras). Offal is a very common ingredient in soto, and is considered as a delicacy: the rumen (blanket/flat/smooth tripe), reticulum (honeycomb and pocket tripe), omasum (book/bible/leaf tripe) and the intestines are all eaten.
Other ingredients of soto include soon alternatively spelled as sohun (rice vermicelli), mung bean sprouts and scallion.
Soto spices include the following: shallot, garlic, turmeric root, galangal, ginger, coriander, salt and pepper.
Soto can have a clear broth, a yellow transparent broth (coloured with turmeric) or a milky coconut-milk broth.
Soto in Malaysia and Singapore is the clear chicken broth type. Like many dishes, it may have been brought into the country by the many Javanese migrants in the early part of the 20th century.

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