A FOOD TRADITION
Sasak Cuisine
Sasak cuisine is associated with the Sasak people of Lombok and combines rice-based meals with chilies, coconut, local greens, eggplant, chicken, seafood, and strongly seasoned spice pastes. It is often marked by sambal-based preparations and by techniques such as grilling, pounding aromatics, simmering, and cooking food in banana leaves. Representative dishes include ayam taliwang, plecing kangkung, and ares. Lombok’s proximity to Bali has produced exchange and overlap, but Sasak cooking has its own ingredients, ceremonial contexts, and chili-centered flavor profile. It should therefore be catalogued separately from Balinese cuisine rather than treated as a Bali variant.
Dishes linked to this cuisine
1–5 of 5
Ayam Taliwang
Lombok grilled young chicken coated in a fiery Sasak spice paste with chilli, aromatics, shrimp paste and palm sugar.
Beberuk Terong
A fresh Lombok salad of raw eggplant, long beans and tomato tossed with a hot red-chilli sambal.
Plecing Kangkung
Blanched Lombok water spinach dressed with a raw, hot tomato-chilli sambal sharpened with shrimp paste, tamarind and lime.
Sate Bulayak
Sasak grilled skewers of beef, beef intestine or chicken served with conical palm-leaf-wrapped rice cakes.
Sate Rembiga
Lombok beef skewers marinated with chilli, garlic and palm sugar for a hot-sweet glaze before grilling.
Catalogue preview Cuisine connections may be unreviewed. Regional comparisons include their food references and do not establish the ingredients of a particular meal.