Junk food of the week: BAKPIA

If you go away for a few days, you will likely be bombarded with requests for oleh-oleh (souvenirs) when you get back: from your office-mates, your friends, even, in our case, the woman who runs the shop on the corner where you buy your drinking water. Everyone will pretend they're kidding ... but you'd better bring something back anyway, because you don't want to be known as that person who never gives out any oleh-oleh.

Bakpia is a food that was made from the mung beans mixture with sugar that was wrapped in previous flour be roasted. In several areas in Indonesia, food that was felt sweet if being eaten this was known by the name of pia or the cake pia. The contents bakpia could adapt with the consumer's wish including being brown, cheese, the green fish basket, and the black fish basket. Bakpia that was enough to be known by one of them to come from the Pathok area, Yogyakarta. For who has try it, don't say what delicious it.

These little flaky stuffed pastries called bakpia are a good choice when you go to Yogyakarta because they are

1. food, so you avoid matters of personal style;

2. affordable;

3. strongly associated with Yogya;

4. pretty universally acceptable (as opposed to, say, durian candy); and

5. tasty.


This box confused me at first because it said purple yam on the front, but then listed the flavors on the side as chocolate, mung bean and cheese. The latter turned out to be flavors added to the purple yam, which is why the fillings above have slightly different colors.

Perhaps it's a measure of how long I've been here that yam-and-cheese doesn't strike me as a weird filling for a cookie. It does seem like gilding the lily, because yam is perfectly tasty on its own. Needless to say, that didn't stop me from eating the whole box.