Learn balinese cuisine at Casa Luna Cooking School in tranquil Ubud

Located on a hillside in Ubud, you can learn all about Indonesian food from teachers with royal pedigree.

Libby Moffet

Bali’s Casa Luna Cooking School.

3 min read

3:00PMDecember 31, 2024

My suitcase is already jam-packed with souvenirs from my Indonesian break yet I’m considering adding a 6kg stone bowl to the mix.

“This is a Bali food processor,” declares our cooking teacher Gusti Ayu Madriani, known as Yukde, as she fills the shallow dish with a collection of pungent spices and begins crushing them with a matching curved stone implement. Known as a cobek and ulekan elsewhere in Indonesia, this large mortar and pestle-style combination is simply referred to as a batu base in Bali, Yukde explains, as she demonstrates how to mash a sizeable volume of spices into a paste on the bowl’s wide surface. I’m convinced my kitchen needs one.

But while Yukde and her three assistants, Ni Made Masniti, Ni Wayan Arini and I Nengah Sudira, make the task look simple, clasping their hands together as they effortlessly shift the spices across the stone in a fluid rolling movement, the technique requires practice.

My friends and I work up a sweat as we pound away, mixing garlic, turmeric, ginger, galangal and chilli to create a sauce for the tuna curry we’re making as part of our seafood cooking class at Bali’s Casa Luna Cooking School.

Yukde at Bali’s Casa Luna Cooking School.

Set in the tranquil grounds of the Second Honeymoon Guesthouse in the hillside town of Ubud, the school was created in 1989 by Melbourne-born Janet DeNeefe, who also owns the guesthouse, popular with yoga devotees, and several local restaurants.

As we sit around a long table in the open air kitchen sipping an invigorating chilled hibiscus tea, Yukde chats about growing up in Ubud.

While she wanted to study medicine, money proved an obstacle so she chose to follow in the footsteps of her mother who had been a cook for the royal family at Ubud Palace.

Over the course of an hour, Yukde talks us through the key ingredients of Balinese cooking, passing around examples such as the exquisite flowers of torch ginger (known as bongkot) and small thin pieces of long pepper (tabia bun). Along the way, she throws in humorous observations, philosophical reflections and a healthy sprinkling of cooking and wellbeing tips such as drink sugar and lemongrass every day to combat arthritis; roll long chilli peppers between your palms to dislodge the seeds.

With only six people in the class, there’s ample room around the stove and plenty of hands-on experience throughout our three-and-a-half-hour session.

Bali’s Casa Luna Cooking School.

As we prepare to chop ingredients on thick wooden boards made from tamarind trees, Yukde mixes up three versions of rujak, a popular sweet and sour salad snack, to demonstrate the influences of tamarind, chilli and shrimp paste.

At one point she throws a large spoonful of salt into the bowl, laughingly calling the generous measure the equivalent of “a Bali pinch”.

One of my friends steps up to the wok when it’s time to make the tuna curry and we take turns wrapping spiced tuna and tofu in banana leaves — an exercise akin to an origami lesson.

A simple carrot and cucumber salad has been prepared earlier so Yukde shows us how to season it with vinegar before serving as part of our seafood lunch. The meal is a delicious spread of fragrant flavours, which we consume quickly before tucking in to the final act, a black rice pudding.

My stomach is full and by the time the class ends I’ve decided that my luggage is too. There is no room for a stone batu base so I settle instead for a lighter souvenir — my booklet of the day’s recipes, which is now splattered with lemongrass and fragrant with the spices of Bali.