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Dave Smith

At 1am, when the only sound that can be heard in the village of Pengayehan, on Bali’s west coast, is a dog barking, Adik Dika walks towards his pig with an eight-inch (20cm) knife in his hand.
The animal squeals as he cuts its throat before draining the blood into a bucket he will later use to make one of the world’s most unusual salads.
After removing the organs, he washes the carcass with coconut water and fills the cavity with cassava leaves, spice paste and volcanic rocks to help distribute the heat as the pig roasts slowly over an open fire fuelled by coconut husks.
He will then spend hour upon hour turning it on a spit while basting it with a blend of coconut oil and turmeric until the skin turns golden brown and becomes as crisp as peeling paint.

As the first sunlight dances across the rice paddies in Pengayehan, Dika will have recreated “babi guling” or turning pig – a Balinese dish that the late food legend Anthony Bourdain rated as the most succulent pork he had ever tasted.
“This is the best pig I have ever had. Absolutely the best,” Bourdain said while filming in Bali, in Indonesia, in 2006. “You think even the finest French chef could ever come up with anything as delicious or as beautiful as this?”
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The art of spit-roasting whole animals dates back to the Stone Age – a primal ritual rife with spiritual and religious connotations that is still practised in many parts of the world today.
In Cuba and the Philippines, roast pigs are an immutable part of Christmas. In Melanesia and the South Pacific, the sacrifice and roasting of pigs are used to cement marriages and peace accords between tribes.
Ceremonial pigs are also eaten in parts of Indonesia where Christianity is dominant, such as the Batak lands of North Sumatra, Toraja and Manado in Sulawesi and throughout Papua, where pigs are cooked with hot rocks underground.

But Bali is the only place in the world where the ancient tradition has evolved into a world-renowned cuisine.
“The history of babi guling is not written but the practice of roasting pigs for Hindu rituals has become Bali’s most well-known dish,” says William Wongso, one of Indonesia’s most respected chefs.
To learn about the history of babi guling, I travelled to Ubud to meet Henry Alexie Bloem, former president of the Indonesian Chef Association. A heavyset, Harley-Davidson-riding character with a hearty laugh to match, Bloem hails from a family of babi guling master chefs.

“When I was growing up in the ’60s, my family was very poor. We only ate rice and vegetables,” Bloem recalls. “But later on, my mother started cooking babi guling in our home. She would wake up at midnight and roast all night.
“At sunrise, her sisters would come and help her make 200 or 300 portions of nasi bungkus [rice packs wrapped in banana leaves] with babi guling to sell them in the market. I was very happy because suddenly my life became full of meat.”
In 1972, Bloem’s mother opened a babi guling warung – the Indonesian word for a family-run eatery – in Bali’s capital, Denpasar. In the 1980s, an aunt opened a warung of her own on the same block.
The history of babi guling is not written but the practice of roasting pigs for Hindu rituals has become Bali’s most well-known dish
William Wongso
Another aunt opened a babi guling stall at Sanglah Market in Denpasar while an uncle opened a warung near the airport, at Jimbaran Bay. Bloem also cooked babi guling occasionally at his old restaurant, Bloem’s Waroeng in Kuta.
“The family never competed against each other because everyone’s babi guling tasted different and they all had different customers,” he says.
Bloem reckons the recipe for babi guling could be more than 1,000 years old. “I believe it was eaten during the ceremonies of the Majapahit Kingdom [13th-16th centuries] and probably before that, too.”

But babi guling’s transition from ceremonial food to street food harks back to the 1920s and ’30s, when European cruise ships docked in Bali.
“My mother told me that when she was a little girl, her mother would help make babi guling for the big cruise ships,” Bloem says.
In the mid-60s, a lady called Ibu Oka (Madame Oka) began selling babi guling rice packages to tourists at Ubud’s famous wet market.
“Until then, you couldn’t buy it as you can now unless you went to a babi guling specialist and ordered a whole pig,” says Ketut Suardana, co-owner of Casa Luna restaurant and cooking school in Ubud. “Ibu Oka changed everything.”

By 1990, Ibu Oka had saved enough to open a warung in a lane behind Ubud’s Royal Palace. It was an instant hit and after Bourdain visited and sang its praises in 2006, thousands followed in his footsteps. It proved a godsend for the family but disastrous for their loyal customers.
“You could see the look of defeat on the waiters’ faces; they were overworked and struggling just to find places to seat customers. Bourdain ruined Ibu Oka,” opines Nick Kasli, a Balinese event planner who is so obsessed with babi guling that one time, when he broke his jaw, he blended a portion so he could drink it through a straw.
Now back onto solids, Kasli is documenting his quest to try every babi guling in Bali on the Instagram account @BabiGulingChampion.
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Wongso says there is nothing special about Ibu Oka; and that the restaurant was simply around at the right time and in the right place during Bourdain’s visit to Indonesia.
“The tourists and bloggers love Ibu Oka,” he says. “But there are better babi guling restaurants in Bali. One of my favourites is Slingsing.”
That would be Babi Guling Slingsing Bu Suci, in Mengwi, a subdistrict neighbouring the hipster haven of Canggu on Bali’s west coast. It is one of 20-odd babi guling joints that have sprung up in the area.
“My aunt had a small warung in a village north of here. But when she got married, she opened this place in 1999,” says Slingsing’s manager, Ibu Pajar.

Set in an old warehouse at the end of a lane, Slingsing is as rustic as a warung can get. The tables are covered in plastic sheets, the floor in grime and the walls in soot. The kitchen is filthy and could pass for a set in Game of Thrones.
I see a woman making sausages from a bucket of blood and guts, and a man roasting a pig over an open fire with only a sheet of plaster wood to protect him from the heat.
Piles of dirty pots and pans stretch towards the ceiling while the squeals of doomed pigs spending their last night on Earth in the kitchen add an element of the macabre.
In Madrid, I had suckling pig. The skin was crisp and crunchy and the meat was soft and white. But compared to babi guling, it had no flavour
Henry Alexie Bloem
But the aesthetics are of no consequence, Bloem says: “The way Indonesians and Westerners see warungs is totally different. Often they are unhygienic but the food is amazing.
“Someone in Ubud recently opened a babi guling restaurant for the tourist market. It’s spotless but the food is terrible.”
By 6pm, Slingsing is packed to the rafters and a queue of impatient Gojek delivery drivers has formed at the counter.
How many people eat here each day? “I don’t know but we’re always busy,” says Ibu Pajar. “Why? I think people love our babi guling because of my aunt’s secret recipe for bumbu.”

There are endless variations of bumbu – spice paste – in Indonesia. Bumbu genep, the most common for babi guling, has ingredients such as garlic, ginger, shallots, turmeric, nutmeg, candlenut, cloves, pepper, lemongrass, chilli, shrimp paste and two kinds of galangal – ginger’s citrusy cousin.
“In Madrid, I had suckling pig,” says Bloem. “The skin was crisp and crunchy and the meat was soft and white. But compared to babi guling, it had no flavour because they don’t use bumbu over there.”
At Slingsing I am shown four kinds of bumbu: one for pigs, another for broth and a third to make lawar, a traditional salad of shredded papaya, long beans and raw pig’s blood.
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“This bumbu has many herbs like dried kaffir lime leaves and ginseng that kill bacteria so you don’t get an upset stomach from eating raw blood,” Bloem says. “I ate it when I was a kid but now I’m scared to in case the cook makes a mistake with the bumbu.”
I take his advice and pass on the blood lawar – along with the blood sausage and deep-fried stomach parts. But I still end up with more than half a dozen elements on my plate – white belly meat, crunchy refried brown meat from the animal’s leg, pig skin, rice, chilli paste, a bowl of turmeric-tinted bone broth and ordinary lawar salad.
It is this variation of elements that makes babi guling so different from all other spit-roast dinners in the world and gives restaurateurs in Bali an opportunity to create real points of difference. “The most elements I have ever seen on a plate of babi guling is 13,” says Kasli.
So how does it taste?

The soup is hot and spicy but not worth writing home about. The crackling splinters against my teeth and fills my mouth with artery-clogging goodness, while the lawar strikes a fresh and earthy counterbalance. But it is the melt-in-the-mouth white belly meat, deeply infused with bumbu, that stands out.
It is not spicy like the soup but aromatic, tangy and sweet.
Before my investigation wraps up, I visit half a dozen other babi guling restaurants. My favourite is Babi Guling Men Lari, an open-air venue with dreamy rice-field views and two elements I have not tasted anywhere before – minced pork satay sticks turbocharged with flavour and super-crunchy pork skin chips.
“Who makes the best babi guling?” asks Kalsi. “That’s the question on everyone’s mind and every Balinese will give you a different answer. But the one true answer is whichever one is closest to you because it’s all about the freshness. The sooner you can get babi guling after it’s cooked, the better.”


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Carving spit-roasted pork at at Babi Guling Slingsing, in Pengayehan on Bali’s west coast. “Babi guling”, or turning pig was rated by late food legend Anthony Bourdain rated the most succulent pork he had ever had. Photo: Ian Lloyd Neubauer

Carving a spit-roasted pig at Babi Guling Slingsing, in Pengayehan on Bali’s west coast. “Babi guling”, or turning pig, is an iconic Balinese dish the late food legend Anthony Bourdain rated as the most succulent pork he ever tasted. Photo: Ian Lloyd Neubauer

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‘Babi guling’ is what Balinese call spit-roasted pig, a dish the late food legend Anthony Bourdain rated as the most succulent pork he had ever tasted
Chefs reveal what makes Bali’s version world-renowned, from the spice paste smeared on the pig to the flavour and mouth feel of the different cuts of meat


Spit-roasted pig can be found across the planet, but nowhere has it become such an art form as in Bali, where the late chef Anthony Bourdain rated it the most succulent pork he’d ever tasted.


Indonesia