Iberia guava paste can be found at Latin American grocery stores or online at parthenonfoods.. Save.Greg Dupree / Food Styling by Julian Hensarling / Prop Styling by Christina Daley.

At first, I thought I knew precisely what Wongso, the 73-year-old chef and Indonesian TV personality who happens to be the island nation's chief culinary diplomat, meant—because sambal was my state of mind..I'd flown there on a hunch: that the sambal oelek I'd been eating for years—the delectable chile paste from Huy Fong Foods, maker of sriracha—was not the be-all and end-all of sambal.

The term sambal, I knew, referred to the spicy condiments found across Indonesia (and Malaysia and Singapore), and because Indonesia is made up of 17,508 islands with individual culinary traditions, I hoped to encounter and begin to understand an untold diversity of fiery riches.Over the course of two weeks, I'd bounce from the capital, Jakarta, on the island of Java, to paradisiacal Bali, to the tip of Sulawesi, to the hills and forests of North Sumatra, tasting every sambal I could dip a spoon into.Along the way, perhaps I would start to understand what sambal meant to the 271 million people in this enormous, mostly Muslim nation..

I started to get a sense on a stroll through a quiet corner of otherwise frenetic Jakarta, when I glanced inside a tiny storefront and saw sambal being, well, "oeleked"—that is, pounded.In a foot-wide granite mortar called a cobek, an older woman had mostly red chiles, some green ones, shallots, and garlic, which she was mashing nonchalantly with a yard-long wooden pestle called an ulekan.

From this proto-sambal rose the heady and unmistakable fragrance of terasi, a fermented shrimp paste that lends umami depth to dishes across the archipelago.. From this proto-sambal rose the heady and unmistakable fragrance of terasi, a fermented shrimp paste that lends umami depth to dishes across the archipelago..

Everywhere I went and ate in Jakarta, there was a version of this sambal, called sambal terasi, often cooked down in oil.That's how she serves it here, like a rococo French onion dip.

Oysters show up elsewhere: raw by the pristine piece, roasted with green curry, or stewed with cream and sunchoke in a decadent pan roast.Gulf seafood dominates the menu, but it's Sullivan's supercharged pantry that makes it all so memorable: that butter, yes, but also the cured lemons and preserved tomato that light up tender rings of squid and fried polenta; and the olives smoked in the belly of a wood-burning hearth and scattered around chunky links of lamb sausage.

At Henrietta Red, Sullivan shows her hand as a chef with a feeling for flavors that are big, uncompromising, and entirely her own.. 09. of 10.Diana Dávila—Mi Tocaya Antojería, Chicago.