(Describer) Shallots, chilis, ginger and garlic are chopped in a food processor. Two women smell the result.

[energetic upbeat music]

[food processor whirs and clicks] Mm, maybe... -Ooh. -[coughing] My God. [laughs]

[both coughing, laughing]

That burns so badly. Even my dishwasher, I had to like pay him extra because it is tough. -Ooh. -This is toxic.

(Describer) Cecilia Phillips:

Have a glass of milk ready because sambal is bringing the heat. This pungent pepper-packed paste knows how to perfectly deliver that spicy tingle to the back of your throat. But if your frame of reference is this plastic jar, it's time to think bigger. There's no one sambal. It can be cooked. It can be raw. It can pack a flavor bomb of umami or a refreshing citrus kick. But there is one constant, the chili pepper, the indispensable ingredient in sambal for centuries, except for when it wasn't. It all begins with Christopher Columbus, a pepper-versus-pepper battle, and ends with a condiment that unites over a quarter of a billion people.

(Describer) Title: Beyond the Menu.

Our sambal guide today is Siska Silitonga. She's been serving up Indonesian food here in the Bay Area for close to a decade. Sauce is kind of my forte. Like, I'm not very good in baking. I'm not very good in a lot of things, but when it comes to sauce and balancing the different flavors and different ingredients, I'm quite proud of myself on that. Tell me a little bit about how you got into cooking. I'm from Indonesia, and originally I'm from Sumatra, the island. North Sumatra. North Sumatra, correct, wow. North Sumatra is a beautiful area, and we eat a lot of spicy stuff, and we're very passionate and loud. Then I moved to Jakarta, and then my mom decided to open her own restaurant. And I was kind of like the person who does all the sauces. So for some reason, I just inherited it from her. To showcase her sauce skills, Siska offered to make not one, not two, but three different versions of sambal, and that's just scratching the surface.

(speaker) Indonesia consists of 17,000 islands; 8,000 are inhabited, but each geography different.

(Describer) William Wongso:

The chili can be different from one place to the other because of soil, because of the climate. In the old days, traditionally, region by region have their own style of sambal to meet with the foods like in Italy, in the region by region, to have the wine to meet with the food, that kind of a principle. There is no definitive number of sambals, but people in the know put it at over 200 in Indonesia alone. It can be as simple as three or four ingredients or can include dozens, but nearly all feature the chili pepper, which, as you might know, is not native to Indonesia.

(Describer) Dave DeWitt:

The chili pepper originated in prehistoric times in Central/South America and was spread up into Mexico by traders. And then when it was spread into Mexico, many, many different varieties were developed.

(Cecilia) When Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, he made sure to bring this new food back across the Atlantic.

(Dave) It was immediate hit when he brought it back to Europe because you could grow it anywhere. The Catholic monks sort of adopted the plant and grew it in their gardens and cultivated it. And from there, it didn't take long for Portuguese traders to spread the chili pepper around the world. By the 16th century, it had reached most of Southeast Asia, where it became the crucial ingredient in sambal.

(William) Sambal is for Indonesian, it's a mindset. A lot of Indonesian, when they don't have sambal in addition to their food, something is missing. So that brings us to Siska's first sambal of the day.

[imitating Julia Child] Our first version

(Describer) Phillips stirs.

of sambal in the kitchen, we've traveled Indonesia.

(Describer) Sililtonga:

(Siska) So we call it "sambal merah."

(Cecilia) What does merah mean?

(Siska) Merah means red. -Red. -It's just red sauce. -Great, perfect, all right. -[Siska laughs]

(Siska) Every household would have this particular sauce in their freezer. You could make a lot of dishes with this. And Siska's chili of choice? So here I use Fresno peppers because we actually grow Fresno peppers in Sonoma and Fresno, right? That's where the name comes from. Very similar to cayenne pepper, which is what we use back home. If you really, really like spicy food, you could add Thai chili, but that's not the goal, right? The goal for me is always just for flavors, you know.

(Ceclia) After combining all the ingredients, all that's left is finishing them off in the pan. The sauce cooks down for about 20 minutes. That gets us the nice flavors? Yeah, I mean, the longer the better. -Yeah. -But if you're in a hurry, and you just want to start cooking for your five kids, like my mom, 20 minutes. Okay, and then this is pretty much ready to go. Yeah, yeah, so today we're doing eggplants, and now we're gonna put our sambal on top. First thing for me is the texture. You can actually taste the chilies. It's not like the jarred sambal, which is just like really thick, and maybe you get a couple seeds here and there. This I'm tasting like the actual flavor of the skin of the chili. Yes, and it's funny-- chili actually has flavors. Yeah, anytime I'm tasting something spicy, I'm always kind of waiting to see how does the flavor kind of hit. It's not that spicy. It's really flavorful.

(Describer) Silitonga serves it on cooked eggplant and a mound of rice.

Let's keep talking flavor. Before the chili pepper made it to Europe and Asia, people got their spicy fix from a different pepper-- black pepper. It's native to southern India and was such a coveted spice that it was often referred to as black gold, not to be confused with liquid gold, which was another name for ghee in India. It gives you that perfect flaky crust for samosas, which you can learn all about right here.

(Describer) Another video.

Anyway, let's get back to the importance of black pepper.

(Dave) Black pepper was established in markets

(Describer) DeWitt:

and in trade centuries and centuries before chili peppers were. But compare the two, and it's pretty obvious how different they look. There's a reason for that.

(Dave) The black pepper, we note is piper, and chili peppers are capsicum, which are completely different genuses of plants. They're unrelated, but the chili pepper was called pepper because it imparted a spicy feeling in the mouth. So the end result is two totally different things, but both are called pepper, and the blame for that falls squarely on Columbus. When he lands in the Americas, he thinks it's India-- strike one. And when he stumbles upon the chili pepper, he thinks it's black pepper-- strike two. Strike three would be the whole jump-started colonialism and the subjugation of a native population thing, but for this video we're talking about strikes one and two. It is completely confusing, and so you have to-- you're constantly explaining exactly what you mean by the term you're using, which is sort of dumb, but I don't see any other way around it.

(Cecilia) When chilies finally did arrive on the scene, it was a swift victory.

(Dave) Here was a spice cheaper than black pepper, more flavorful than black pepper, easier to produce and grow than black pepper. It's no wonder that chili pepper spread around the world. If you want your sambals spicy, Siska has you covered with sambal number two, sambal matah.

(Siska) "Matah" means raw-- comes from Bali. I actually studied with temple chef there and learned Balinese cooking. I used Thai chili this time, and this is spicier than Fresno. No one asked me if I knew how to use a knife before we started this series, so I think I should have signed a waiver of some kind. [laughs]

(Siska) I can cut it, too, if you want, Cecilia.

(Describer) They cut shallots and lemongrass.

(Cecilia) So you said that the sambal was raw? So, what are we gonna be cooking in here? You're just gonna pour it. -So we pickle it, basically. -So this? We're pickling it with coconut oil.

(Describer) She pours hot oil into the mixture.

-[liquid sizzling] -(Cecilia) Ooh.

(Siska) This is the sambal that we like to use our fingers. -It's very hot. -It's super hot. Sauce is very hot. She's gonna die. Okay.

(Cecilia) I'm excited to try this one. It's pretty intense.

(Siska) I have here garlic chips, so we could just dip.

[both crunching]

-Mm. -It's still warm. It's so good. It's like really light. Mm, can I have another one? -Mm-hm. -[Cecilia laughs] With the chili beating out black pepper to become the spice king, it's tempting to think that sambal must have come along after chilies arrived in the 1500s. I mean, who wants a sambal made with black pepper? So here's the head-scratcher for you. Experts we talked to actually said that sambals in Indonesia have been around since at least the 10th century, hundreds of years before the arrival of the chili. Turns out there is a third pepper in our story called long pepper. It's a close relative of black pepper. And, fun fact, our English word "pepper" comes from the Sanskrit word for long pepper. And there are two slightly different versions, one from northern India and another from Indonesia.

(William) Before they know chili, that's how they started to have this spiciness.

(Describer) Wongso:

Determining exactly when long pepper was being used in sambals is hard to pin down. The problem in Indonesia is global society. Everything they say, what they said is not written. "My grandmother told me. Great-grandmother told me," and this is how they pass on. And a lot of things have been forgotten. Long pepper had its own period of dominance. It made its way to ancient Greece around the 6th century BC, where it was used as an herbal medicine and to flavor wine. By the time of the Roman Empire, it was being used regularly to season food. Long pepper reigned supreme until the Romans figured out sailing roots to southern India, allowing them to snatch up a bunch of black pepper that would eventually flood the spice market. The now more expensive long pepper was slowly abandoned. And that's true even to this day, so much so that if you presented long pepper to someone from, say, the island of Java... They would not familiar because if you taste like a long pepper, give it to Javanese as a food, they will freak out. They think this is jamu. "Jamu" is an Indonesian term for herbal medicine. So what if we turn back the clock and try to recreate one of these ancient sambals with long pepper instead of chilies? How would it taste? Okay, so what is this sambal called?

(Siska) This is called base genep, which is from Bali. It has everything but chili.

(Cecilia) How did this one have no chili in it? If you go to Bali right now, of course, they put chili in it. However, I want to highlight this ingredient called long pepper. Before chili, this is what they used to kind of punch the flavor, just super strong and flavorful and can add flavors to anything.

(Describer) Many ingredients are finely chopped and sautéed in oil.

-[food processor whirring] -There we go.

[pan sizzling]

(Siska) Okay, let's taste it. So now we have pork belly rice.

(Cecilia) I like this one 'cause this is not spicy at all.

(Describer) Phillips tastes.

-Mm. -Not at all. It's all flavor. But with the long pepper, can you taste the pepper? You could taste it in the back of your mouth. There's so much going on. There's a ton of flavor.

(Describer) Some sambals resemble a green relish.

Without chili, Indonesian will not suffer. However, chili just enhance our lives. We're thankful for folks bringing chilies to us. But at the same time, I want to make sure that everyone knows that we're a country full of spices that's worth exploring. You were just here for, you know, a couple of hours, but you can see the complexity in so many ingredients. But with those base ingredients, we were able to make a lot of different cool stuff that's super different-- -Exactly. -Each of 'em. So, thank you for sharing your recipes and your menu with me; I really appreciate it. -Thank you. -It's been great.

[laughs] It's been really great.

Awesome. Sambal is the ultimate flavor-enhancer, so no matter what food you're craving, there is a sambal out there to match. And if you want more food to explore, check out our episode on the corn tortilla, which may sound simple but actually relies on a 3,000-year-old science. It goes great with anything chili, maybe even sambal? And as always, don't forget to like, subscribe, and tell us where we should go next "Beyond the Menu."

(Describer) She smells a red sambal in a jar.

[sniffs] Still spicy.

[Cecilia inhales and sighs]

(announcer) Support for this program comes from Krishnan Shah Family Foundation and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund.

(Describer) Accessibility provided by the US Department of Education.

Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.