Killed, Skinned, Skewered & Served at Yogya's Sate Secret

Photo: Godeliva Sari, JG

One of Yogyakarta’s best-kept culinary secrets is a small sate warung (stall) that is only open in the evenings. “Unless I am invited to go to a hotel or a celebration somewhere, I open every day of the week from 6:30 p.m. till 12:30 a.m or later,” said Ahmad Sobarry, known as Barry, the owner and chef of Sate Klathak Pak Barry. The tiny warung is inside the Jejeran traditional market on the road toward Imogiri, around 5 kilometers south of the Yogyakarta bus terminal. A list of its regular clients reads like a who’s who of the city and includes Prince Paku Alam, politician Amien Rais, comedian and actor Butet Kartaredjasa, fashion designer Nita Azhar and writer Agus Noor.

But what is so special about Barry’s sate? “I only use healthy, young, fat-tailed lambs because they don’t smell as much as goats,” Barry says, “and I always kill and prepare my sheep myself — I don’t buy meat that other people have killed.

“But most importantly, I invented the name sate klathak to describe my special spiceless sate. Because I don’t use any spices I must choose the best meat. So my prices are higher than other sate sellers, and I think that also attracts customers. People like to eat something that costs a little more but tastes better. ”

Typically Barry starts his workday at around 3:30 p.m., when his assistant Aris kills one or two lambs, skins them and butchers the carcasses in preparation for the evening’s trade. At least once a week, Barry and Aris go by pickup truck up the Imogiri hills to visit Pak Bekti, a livestock dealer who buys sheep from as far away as Pacitan in East Java, to sell to sate warungs in the area.

“I pick up my animals and Bekti gives me the bill, which I pay the next time I come,” Barry says. He chooses healthy, fat lambs that are between six months and a year old “so the meat is tender.” Usually they purchase around eight animals, “unless we have an order for more.”

The lambs chosen have their legs bound with rope and are thrown in the back of the pickup. Once back at Barry’s home, all but those to be killed that day are unbound and put in a pen behind the house, beside a second car which Barry said he bought with profits from his sate business.

Aris carries the animals to be butchered to the killing area, where he places one on an old car tire and leaves the second on the ground facing away from the first, “so that it doesn’t see its friend being killed because that would upset it.” He sharpens his knife and tests the edge on the lamb’s wool. “The knife must be very sharp, otherwise it would be cruel,” he explains.

He places an old paint tub under the hogget’s neck, covers the animals eyes and holds its jaws together with his left hand. “Bismillah” (“In the name of God”), he says, before slicing through the lamb’s neck, cutting the wind pipe and arteries. The animal struggles a little in silence. When the blood stops spurting from the lamb’s neck, Aris severs its head from the body with several deft strokes of the knife. He then makes incisions on the legs and hangs the carcass upside down from a pole while he repeats the process with the second animal. When both carcasses are hanging, Aris proceeds to skin them by first slitting the skin from the groin to the chest and severing the forelegs. He then cuts through the skin where the legs join the bodies and slides the sharp knife between the skin and the flesh, pushing his hands into the opening and pulling the skin off as if it were a tight sweater.

Once the skins are removed, Barry’s mother lays them on the ground and rubs salt into them, “so that they will keep until a sheepskin dealer picks them up,” she said. She also takes the severed heads into the kitchen and, with the aid of hot water, plucks the wool from them. When they are done, Barry’s wife singes the remaining hair off with a flame and then cracks the skulls open by hammering a knife on the skull using a piece of firewood. Meanwhile, Aris slits open the stomachs and lets the guts fall out, being careful not to pierce the intestines. Gently he unravels the intestines and squeezes the half digested food from them. He cuts open the lambs’ rib cages and carefully removes the gall bladders and livers. The task of disemboweling takes around 30 minutes for each animal, and when he is done he cuts off the shanks and carves up the meat off the ribs and backbone.

The meat is put on a flat bamboo basket, and the tripe and intestines are put in a tub. It is nearly 5 p.m. when Aris jumps on his motorbike and takes the guts and intestines to an irrigation canal outside of his village, where he slits the gut open and turns the intestines inside out and washes them in the running water. The head, intestines, guts and bones will go into a gule (curry) being prepared by Barry’s mother and wife. “We use the milk of around four coconuts to make gule out of each sheep,” Barry’s mother says, “and we use all sorts of spices, including galangal, ginger, lemon grass, cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander and more. We boil everything for around an hour, and then it is ready to serve.”

After the evening prayer, Barry, Aris and another assistant take their pots of gule and other equipment to set up their warung inside the Jejeran market. Barry prepares a terra-cotta charcoal burner to barbecue the sate, which he threads on metal skewers fashioned from bicycle spokes as his customers order. A portion of his sate klathak comprises two skewers of meat, a plate of white rice and some gule broth, and costs Rp 10,000 ($1).

By 9 p.m., Barry’s first celebrity customer has arrived — Liberal Islam Network founder Ulil Abshar Abdalla with several friends. Ulil is on vacation from his studies for a PhD at Harvard Univeristy and his Yogya friends are taking him on a foodie tour. They order the full menu; sate klathak, gule, tongseng and tengkleng . Tongseng is a stir-fry of chopped meat, liver and kidney cooked in gule broth “with additional candlenut and garlic, topped with sweet soy sauce,” Barry says. Tengkleng is the “bones and other bits of the gule stew, served dry as an appetizer.”

A little later the writer Agus Noor arrives and orders a plate of sate klathak and tongseng of testicles, and at around 9:30 p.m. comedian and actor Butet Kartaredjasa arrives with his wife, son and daughter. They know Ulil and his friends and laugh at the many empty plates in front of them.

“We have made a real mess here already,” Ulil says, when Butet suggests they order more food.

“Butet is one person who has really helped promote my business,” Barry said, “because after the earthquake, he wrote about me in the Kompas national broadsheet, and from then on I have had more and more famous people come here. Butet also paid me to prepare and cook six sheep at his son’s recent wedding in May. He often stays here until I close.”

Butet and his wife have just come back from three weeks in Europe. “We just got off the plane this afternoon and this is our first meal home,” he says, as he picks up a stick of sate to eat. He takes a bite, closes his eyes and says, “Mmmmmm, this is as good as the best lamb chops!” (Godeliva D Sari)

Sumber: The Jakarta Globe, 28/07/2009