The ingredients of rujak, a mixed fruit-and-vegetable salad, are hard to distinguish once they've all been dressed in thick brown sauce. Even au naturel, a few may be unfamiliar.
This vendor wielded two mortars and pestles for her two salads, including the lesser-seen rujak bebeg. For this "mashed" rujak, the slices of fruits and vegetables (most of them, anyway) are ground to bits in the same mortar where the components of the dressing have just been combined. Compare rujak bebeg (first photo below) to that of the more familiar rujak, with unmashed slices (second photo).
In theory the two dressings might employ identical ingredients; in practice, for the rujak bebeg the vendor included the same sugar, tamarind, chiles, and shrimp paste but withheld the crushed peanut. (When I took note, she offered to add it, but I wanted to have what she would have been having.) The roster of fruits and vegetables differed somewhat, too: Like the basic rujak, the rujak bebeg included apple and green mango, but it disdained cucumber and pineapple. In their stead were two firmer substitutes that, when mashed, had a granular rather than pulpy consistency: a peeled, bright orange yam and, shown above, an unripe, squarish, crisp-fleshed burro banana.
Also shown: nasi uduk, a coconut rice platter; bacang, the Indonesian counterpart to zongzi; soto Gubeng, a clear beef-broth soup. For my bowl, hefty slices of beef shin supported by cubes of compressed rice formed a central island, while beef tripe, a hardboiled egg, and more rice cubes lurked just below the surface of the surrounding moat. On a breezy day when the churchyard canopy offered shelter from the drizzle rather than from the sun, this soup, one of three on offer, was especially welcome.
Gereja Bethany Indonesian Food Bazaar
Gereja Bethany Indonesia New York, 39-04 61st St. (at 39th Ave.), Woodside, Queens
(The bazaar, apparently a one-off, was held on June 27, 2015)
