Summary
Cumi Kuah Hitam - black ink seafood soup from Bali. Spicy, deep umami flavors, three sambals, sweating, survival and a brief moment of feeling like a local.
This is a typical Balinese experience, not a tourist dish.
I had this soup yesterday.
During my long walk I saw its picture on the wall of a restaurant.
Black juice. Must be exciting – I thought – so I ordered one.
Black ink seafood soup – Cumi Kuah Hitam
Cumi = squid, (in many places octopus is also called this loosely), hitam = black, kuah = soup, juice.
The recipe for the dish is that simple.
The dark color comes from the kluwek (kepayang) seed. It is the seed of a tropical tree. What is worth knowing about it: The seed turns dark brown-black after fermentation, and is poisonous when raw due to its cyanide content. Therefore, it can only be consumed after a long fermentation and cooking, and its preparation requires traditional knowledge.
It gives an earthy, smoky, deep “umami” flavor. Umami is the fifth basic flavor, I learned about this concept during a sushi making course, back in Hungary.
The soup is served with rice and three types of sauce, called sambal. The typical sambal offering – I suspect that’s what I got too:
- sambal matah – fresh, raw
- sambal merah – cooked, brutal
- sambal terasi – deep, fermented
The soup itself is spicy, but the three sambals nicely represented the spicy, even spicier and brutal categories.
I slowly learned how Asian people eat soup. As you can see in the picture, they bring out the soup with a ladle. I get a small plate with it. I put some of the soup, the sambal on this small plate and I even put some of the rice in it.
This way I can practically try the dish in several versions. Without sauce, with a little sauce and with a deadly amount of sauce.
The soup itself is tasty, its strength is not too offensive. You can feel all the lovely flavors of the squid, the freshness of the lime, the strength of the paprika and the speciality of the kluwek.
The three sambals are three characters. The weakest one was hazelnut, it was very tasty. The other two showed that the strong paprika is no joke here either.
As a good Hungarian child, I ate everything. All the soups, the rice and the three sauces.
I drank ice water after practically every small bowl of soup I made, I felt a bit like it was a condition for survival. And I used up a kilogram of paper towels, because the sweat was even running down my ears.
Yesterday, before the soup, I only ate fruit. This is perhaps not the best preparation for eating such a meal. I had to travel about 2-3 kilometers from the restaurant to my home, but – to be honest – there were moments when I thought that this fuel might not allow a safe landing.
Fortunately, I got home. But the experience of the soup was present in my life for about 24 hours. This reminded me of Uncle Anti’s song – I’ll end this thought with this.
“I dreamed I was squatting in the lake, why, I won’t even mention it for decency’s sake!”
The culinary experience was made special by a brief look of appreciation. I was sitting alone as a European in the open restaurant. When I was already sweating and working on the soup, a family sat down next to me, and the mother greeted me with an appreciative look and smile.
I felt like it was saying “nice job!” You are here, in this restaurant – more like a warehouse – where we are too and you eat what the locals eat.
Maybe I became a real Balinese after a soup.Buy me a coffee?
If you enjoyed this story, you can buy me a coffee. You don’t have to – but it means a lot and I always turn it into a new adventure.
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Short introduction