The Living Pantry

The flora and the trees of the Borneo rainforest hold their own grammar of flavour. Indigenous communities have cooked with these leaves and these fats for generations. What chemistry calls glutamate, and what the Japanese call umami and amami, the rainforest has always known.

No dairy is used in this cuisine. The indigenous people of Borneo did not raise cattle for milk; they had no need to. The body of every sauce, the richness of every cooked dish, the emulsification that holds a glaze together — all of it comes from Engkabang butter, the rainforest’s own answer to the dairy other cultures developed.

What follows are the elements of the Sarawak pantry I have learned to cook with. Their function is foundational, not decorative — the rainforest’s own answers to flavour, given in advance of the science that named them.

Engkabang butter

Shorea macrophylla, also recently reclassified as Rubroshorea macrophylla; Dipterocarpaceae family, Red Meranti group.

Professor Gerard Bodeker shared the anecdote with me at the press launch in Kuala Lumpur, and the line stayed with me. Dato Dennis Ngau, Chairman of the Sarawak Tourism Board and of Kayan origin — one of the Orang Ulu communities of Sarawak’s upriver regions — recalled his youth: rice and Engkabang butter as a staple, the simple meal that gave him the strength and nourishment to battle the jungle’s changing weather. The memory is rooted in the very landscape where the Engkabang tree fruits. That is where this entry begins.

The Engkabang tree fruits only once every three to five years, and not always then. Its illipe nuts are gathered from riverbanks, sun-dried or smoke-dried, then pressed in the traditional Pitan — a wooden oil press still in use across Sarawak — and the golden liquid is poured into bamboo tubes, where it cools and hardens. So is the Sarawak rainforest butter made.

The flavour is faintly cocoa, woody, nutty, with a lemak mouthfeel that no dairy butter quite matches. It is solid at room temperature and melts the moment it meets heat — the way cocoa butter does, which is no coincidence. Its fatty-acid composition is close enough to cocoa butter that the fine chocolate industry uses it as a cocoa-butter replacer.

Across every Serumpun dish, Engkabang butter does the work that cream and dairy butter do in other cuisines: emulsification, body, the richness that holds a sauce together. The risotto pictured above is the proof — the venison course at Osaka, mantecare with Engkabang. The Borneo French BBQ glace shown in the next section carries it too. The tree is endangered. The butter is precious.

Daun Bungkang

Syzygium polyanthum, known elsewhere as daun salam.

Mina Thrang taught me Daun Bungkang and Ipa’ Kayu both. She is Kelabit, from the Bario highlands of northern Sarawak — a master forager who learned to read wild plants from her mother and grandmother. The rainforest is our supermarket, she says. She demonstrates indigenous cooking at Lepau Restaurant in Kuching and at gatherings like the Sarawak HEARTH and Food Over Fire Festival, championing the old ways against the slow drift of urban forgetting. The two leaves on these next entries reached me through her hands.

Daun Bungkang carries umami in its raw chemistry. Its glutamic acid content sits close to six per cent by weight — a figure that places it alongside the world’s natural umami carriers. Slip the leaf into a vegetable, a meat, a fish; the dish tightens, and the savoury reads true.

The same discipline runs across all three Serumpun chapters. The beef at Kuching, the venison at Osaka, the lamb at Mulu — each protein, after aging and relaxation, was cured with Daun Bungkang for twenty-four hours. A finishing touch borrowed from the Iban traditional cooking repertoire, where the leaf is most often applied to game meats and older livestock to break their tougher muscle fibres. Across these three proteins, the leaf did the same two things: it fortified the umami already present in the meat, and it readied the muscle for the plate. One leaf, three proteins, one method — Iban knowledge in the language of the kitchen.

Kasam (Pekasam)

Indigenous Sarawak fermentation — protein, coarse salt, toasted rice, time.

Dato Sri’ Karim, Minister of MTCP — Sarawak’s Ministry of Tourism, Creative and Performing Arts — introduced me to Kasam at our second meeting, in his office in Petrajaya, Kuching. The technique I had only read about, he explained as living practice. That conversation is where this entry begins.

Kasam, also called Pekasam, is the Iban fermentation of fish, boar, or beef in coarse salt and toasted rice. Plain rice is dry-fried until dark and pounded into a coarse powder; rubbed onto the salted protein, packed into a guci or tempayan with no air, then sealed and aged. Lactic acid bacteria convert the rice’s starch to acid; the acid preserves the protein and breaks its proteins into the amino acids that read as deep umami on the tongue. Unlike vinegar pickling or salt curing, Kasam earns its character from time — two weeks at minimum, one to three months when patience holds. Kasam Ikan preserves freshwater fish, including Empurau, Semah, and Toman from Sarawak’s rivers; the scales soften and become edible after fermentation. Kasam Babi — Pekasam Babi — is the wild-boar variant, prized in Iban longhouses. Kasam Ensabi extends the technique to mustard greens.

At the Kuching Finale, the beef received Kasam alongside the Daun Bungkang cure — the leaf working the muscle, the ferment carrying the seasoning. Two indigenous methods on one protein. The salt that another kitchen would have reached for never appeared on the plate.

Ipa’ Kayu

Manihot esculenta — the leaves of the cassava plant.

From Mina Thrang’s hands, alongside the Daun Bungkang above.

Ipa’ Kayu earns its flavour by hand. The leaves are squeezed and twisted to draw the bitterness out, then pounded to release a green sweetness — what the Japanese call amami — and the earth beneath it. The work of the hands is the inheritance: indigenous knowledge of how to ready the leaf for the table. The marriage with salted fish or shrimp paste is what the Sarawak kitchen has always known to do with this leaf.

Gula Apong

Unrefined Nipah palm sugar, Sarawak.

Gula Apong is the unrefined sugar drawn from the Nipah palm, cultivated and tapped along Sarawak’s coastal estuaries. It carries what refined sugars discard — minerals, amino acids, vitamins, and a measured sweetness that does not surge. Its flavour is not so much sweetness as a kind of caramel earth. The Nipah palm is regenerative; the sugar arrives in the kitchen the way the rainforest gives it, with little done in between.