Bebek Betutu

Bebek Betutu – in Bahasa Indonesia Bebek is duck, and Betutu is the name of the blend of spices. It is a popular ceremonial dish in Bali.

On a little island just off Pulau Bawean in the Java Sea, Dwayne and I decided to cook a duck on the beach. The first thing we had to do was decide how we would cook this duck (it would take about four hours).

We tossed around ideas of cooking the duck’ hungi’ or ‘lovo’ style (buried in the ground with hot rocks). However, because we didn’t know whether the stones on the beach would hold their heat, we decided to build an ‘oven’ with a small fire at the bottom.

Armed with a small shovel and some ideas on what he wanted to build, Dwayne headed to the beach to build the oven while I made the betutu paste and prepared the duck.

Recipe for betutu paste.

For the betutu paste, I blended shallots, garlic, candlenuts, shrimp paste, galangal, ginger, turmeric, chilli, palm sugar, black peppercorns, coriander seeds, lime juice, kaffir lime leaves in my mortar.

I cleaned the duck and then rubbed paste inside the duck cavity and all over the outside. I wrapped the duck in banana leaves, put it in a tray, and covered it with alfoil. The duck was ready to put in Dwayne’s oven.

Meanwhile, Dwayne had found a large slab of wood with a ready-made chimney and used it as the back wall of his oven. Using a large rock on the beach as another wall, he had to build the following two oven walls out of rocks and sand. He left a small opening at the bottom of the oven to feed the fire. After I put the prepared duck into the oven, we closed the top with bamboo and pandanus leaves.

We had to feed the small fire at the bottom of the oven constantly as we didn’t have any first-class wood to build up the coals.

We wrapped a couple of potatoes in alfoil and popped them in the oven. Meanwhile, I was soaking a length of bamboo in the sea and preparing it to cook some rice.

All I did for the rice was add 1 cup of rice and 1 1/2 cups of fresh water to the bamboo and seal the top with alfoil. I propped the bamboo over a small fire and simmered the rice until it was miraculously cooked… to perfection.

However, not everything went as smoothly as the rice. Our oven partially collapsed once, and the roof of bamboo and pandanus leaves caught alight a couple of times! But in the end, the duck was fall-apart tender. Potatoes and rice were al dente. Fantastic meal in a beautiful setting. Well worth the five hours of hard work!