Coconut & Sambal

The most welcoming introduction to Indonesian cooking published in the last decade. Lara Lee, an Australian chef of Chinese-Indonesian heritage, spent years traveling across the Indonesian archipelago, learning recipes from home cooks, street vendors, and family members. The result is a book that captures the warmth and variety of the cuisine without overwhelming a newcomer.

Why Start Here

Most Indonesian cookbooks either lean heavily academic or focus on a single region. Coconut & Sambal strikes a different balance. Lee organizes her 80-plus recipes around the way Indonesians actually eat: rice and noodle dishes at the center, with chapters dedicated to sambals, soups, snacks, vegetables, and sweets branching out from there. You get the essentials (nasi goreng, beef rendang, chicken satay, gado-gado) alongside less familiar dishes that show the real breadth of the cuisine.

The sambal chapter alone is worth the price of the book. Lee walks you through more than a dozen varieties, from the raw, punchy sambal matah of Bali to the slow-cooked richness of sambal oelek. Once you understand sambal as a category rather than a single condiment, Indonesian cooking clicks into place. The spice paste instructions are equally clear, teaching you to build bumbu (the aromatic foundation of most dishes) from scratch using ingredients that are increasingly easy to find in Western supermarkets.

Lee writes with personal warmth, weaving in stories of the people and places behind each recipe. The photography is gorgeous and captures the islands beautifully. But this is not a coffee table book. The recipes are practical, well-tested, and written for home kitchens with standard equipment.

What to Expect

A medium-sized cookbook at 288 pages with full-color photography throughout. The recipes are organized by type and most are achievable on a weeknight. You will need a few specialty ingredients like shrimp paste, palm sugar, kecap manis (sweet soy sauce), and candlenuts, but Lee provides clear guidance on sourcing and substitutions. Named one of the best cookbooks of 2020 by the New York Times, the Guardian, and National Geographic.