Gudeg, the legendary traditional food

Gudeg is a traditional Javanese dish from Yogyakarta and Central Java, Indonesia. In its development, people recognize the famous gudeg from Yogyakarta, making the city known as the City of Gudeg. The history of gudeg in Yogyakarta began with the establishment of the Islamic Mataram kingdom on Mentaok pedestal in the Kotagede area around the 1500s.

Gudeg did not originate from the kingdom but from the people. Due to the long cooking process, there were not many people selling gudeg in the 19th century. Gudeg became popular and widely traded in the 1940s when President Sukarno built Gajah Mada University (UGM) until now.

Gudeg is made from unripe young jackfruit (Javanese: gori). It is boiled for several hours with palm sugar, and coconut milk additional spices including garlic, shallots, candlenut, coriander seeds, galangal, bay leaves, and teak leaves, which give a reddish-brown color to the dish.

With these various spice mixtures, gudeg becomes sweet on the tongue and has a distinctive and pleasant taste that suits the tastes of the Javanese people in general. It is often described as “sweet boiled green jackfruit”.