About Citarasa Nusantara

Citarasa Nusantara is an independent food publication about Indonesian and Southeast Asian home cooking. The name means, roughly, "the taste of the archipelago" — which is the entire point of the site: the everyday cooking of a region with hundreds of kitchens and thousands of variations.

What we publish

We publish recipes. Real ones, written out step by step: what to buy, what to chop, what heat to use, how long to cook, and how to tell when a dish is finished. Alongside them we publish shorter guides about ingredients, because the fastest way to cook Indonesian food badly is to use the wrong coconut milk or skip the shrimp paste.

How recipes are developed

Each recipe is cooked in a home kitchen, photographed or note-taken as it goes, and then written up. Where a dish has many regional versions, the variation is explained rather than hidden. Where a step is genuinely optional, it is labelled as such. Where a step looks fussy but is not, we say why it matters.

We do not publish recipes we have not cooked, and we correct recipes when readers report that a step or a quantity does not hold up.

Who writes it

Citarasa Nusantara is written and edited by a small team of home cooks with family roots in Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, plus a long-standing habit of cooking these dishes far from home, where substitutions have to be honest.

Independence and funding

The site is supported by advertising and, where relevant, clearly labelled affiliate links to equipment. Advertising never determines what we write about, and no brand pays for a recipe to appear here.

Corrections

If something is wrong — a quantity, a time, a translation — tell us through the contact page and it will be checked and fixed.