Danish vs Indonesian food & cuisine

Denmark

SEASONINGS

Danish cooking is fat-forward. Butter and cream are the base ingredients. The other major flavor source is preservation: smoked fish, cured meats, pickled vegetables — these carry most of the interesting flavor in traditional Danish food.

Danish cooking threads sweetness through savory contexts constantly: red cabbage rødkål is braised with sugar and vinegar, pickled herring is sweet-sour; brown sauce gets a small amount of sugar to round it. Remoulade — the yellow condiment you get with fish — is noticeably sweeter than its French cousin.

Dill is the signature herb. If one plant marks Danish food as distinctively itself, this is it. It goes with fish, with potatoes, with cream sauces, and in pickles. Allspice marks Danish savory cooking, it goes into frikadeller, sausages and braises. Nutmeg appears in white sauces, in creamed spinach, and occasionally in meatballs alongside the allspice. Caraway goes in rye bread and certain cheeses. White pepper gets used in traditional recipes more than black, which is a specific northern European tendency.

No garlic in traditional cooking. Onion does the allium work — fried onions, caramelized onions, raw rings on smørrebrød. Garlic is now normal in contemporary Danish kitchens, but it has no deep traditional roots. No heat whatsoever. No chili tradition, no peppercorn dishes, nothing that builds warmth through capsaicin. The only heat in traditional Danish cooking is the vague warmth of allspice and white pepper. No complex layering of spices. Danish cooking uses one or two spices per dish, added simply, without the idea that spice complexity is a virtue.

Danish mustard is strong and grainy; it functions as both a condiment and a flavoring. It goes with herring, with pork, as a base note in dressings and sauces. It provides the closest thing to real sharpness.

The Christmas spices — cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger — constitute almost a separate parallel pantry that activates in December and disappears again. Brunkager, pebernødder, æbleskiver batter, gløgg — this is when Denmark actually uses a complex palette. Cardamom in a weekday Danish dish would read as wrong, but in Christmas pastry, it’s essential.

SAUCES

Danish sauces moisturize dishes and enrich them mildly. Almost all of them are dairy-based, thickened with starch.

BRUN SOVS – brown sauce made from pan drippings, thickened with flour, sometimes with a pinch of sugar to round it out. Goes on meatballs, roast pork, almost any hot dish that needs something on it.

PERSILLESOVS – béchamel with parsley chopped in. Butter, flour, milk, parsley, the sauce for stegt flæsk — the dish Danes voted their national dish.

FLØDESOVS – is a cream sauce, used with chicken, game, mushrooms. Sometimes just reduced cream.

SENNEPSSOVS — mustard sauce — pairs specifically with poached cod. Cream or butter base with mustard stirred in. The mustard adds the closest thing to sharpness that Danish sauces typically get.

REMOULADE – is the most distinctively Danish sauce. It’s yellow from turmeric, sweeter, milder, mayonnaise-based, with finely chopped pickled vegetables mixed through: capers, pickled cucumber. The result is tangy-sweet-mild, nothing aggressive. It goes with fish, with hot dogs, with fried fish cakes. Sold in tubes and jars everywhere, consumed in large quantities.

KARRYSOVS – a fascinating example of domesticated foreign flavors. The curry used is very mild, often just turmeric with faint cumin notes,  sold as “Danish curry powder”. The sauce ends up sweet, yellow, creamy, and so mild it barely registers as curry to anyone who knows the original. It appears in curry herring karrysild, in chicken salad, in egg dishes.

Indonesia

SEASONINGS

Indonesian cuisine has bold, direct seasoning rather than the refined, subtle flavor layering. Flavors are centered around a balance of the five sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami tastes. However, in practice, it has a leaning towards sweet undertones, more predominant than in other cuisines.

Some characteristically Indonesian are combinations of turmeric, galangal and ginger (especially the galangal), lemongrass, tamarind, garlic, shallots, kaffir lime leaves, pandan leaves, chili pepper, candlenuts, palm sugar and the sweet soy sauce kecap manis.

Unlike North Indian cooking tradition that favours dried spice mixes, Indonesian cuisine is more akin to Thai, which use more fresh ingredients. Bumbu is the Indonesian word for seasoning; this word frequently appears in all –  spice mixtures, sauces, seasoning pastes.  The bumbu mixture is usually stir-fried in hot cooking oil first to release its aroma, prior to adding other ingredients. There are four main basic bumbu blends:

BUMBU DASAR PUTIH / WHITE BLEND: garlic, shallots, candlenut, coriander, and galangal. It is used in lighter-colored dishes such as opor ayam (chicken in coconut milk), sayur lodeh (vegetable stew), and various sotos (traditional soups).

BUMBU DASAR MERAH / RED BLEND: red chilies are added to the white spice blend, sometimes with tomato, shrimp paste, and sugar. It is used for reddish dishes like sambal goreng, nasi goreng, and various spicy stews.

BUMBU DASAR KUNING / YELLOW BLEND: Contains turmeric along with shallots, garlic, candlenut, coriander, ginger, galangal, and black pepper. It colors and flavors nasi kuning (yellow rice), soto, and pepes (food wrapped in banana leaves).

BUMBU DASAR JINGGA / ORANGE BLEND: a richer blend combining red chili with spices such as caraway, anise, coriander, candlenut, turmeric, and galangal, used in gulai (curry), rendang, and other robustly flavored stews and curries.

Although Indonesia is the home of cloves and nutmeg, these two spices are not as predominantly used in everyday cooking as one might expect. Cloves and nutmeg are more regionally significant, especially in Maluku and some Eastern islands, in medicine and rituals.

Palm sugar is a natural sweetener from the sap of various palm trees, used in tropical Southeast Asia. It has less sweetness and a rich, complex caramel-like taste with hints of butterscotch. In Indonesian cuisine, palm sugar is essential. The two common types are gula jawa (Javanese sugar), dark and molasses-like, and gula aren, which is lighter and more delicate.