Tempe jae santen

As tradition built it

Ferment 24 to 48 hours, finish in minutes.

Ingredients

• 500 g dried soybeans
• about ¼ tsp (roughly 1g per kg soybeans) Rhizopus starter culture (ragi tempe), or a piece of an existing batch of fresh tempeh
• to cover banana leaf (perforated) or perforated plastic, to wrap
• to taste for jae santen tempe: coconut milk, ginger, palm sugar, salt

Method

1. Soak the soybeans overnight, then boil them with the hulls on for around 30 minutes. This soaking and boiling step matters beyond softening the bean: it allows natural lactic acid bacteria to lower the pH, suppressing spoilage organisms before the real fermentation begins.
2. Drain and hull the beans, then inoculate them, traditionally with spores carried on a previously used tempeh wrapping leaf, or with a measured Rhizopus starter, and pack tightly into perforated banana leaf or plastic parcels.
3. Ferment: 24 to 48 hours at 30 to 35°C under the modern, temperature controlled method, or 36 to 48 hours at ambient room temperature by the older route, an initial overnight ferment typically followed by piercing the parcel to admit air for a second overnight ferment. The beans are ready when a tight, even, white mycelium has bound them into a single, firm, sliceable cake with no grey or black patches.
4. To finish simply, as jae santen tempe, the preparation named in the Serat Centhini itself: simmer sliced fresh tempeh in coconut milk with ginger, a little palm sugar and salt until the tempeh has taken up the liquid and the sauce has reduced slightly. This is deliberately a store cupboard dish, cooked to taste rather than to a fixed ratio, and this chapter states that honestly rather than inventing a precision the tradition itself does not claim.

Notes

Tempeh's origin is genuinely contested, covered in full in the History above: a sixteenth century Serat Centhini literary trace against a specific, later Tembayat, Bayat, Klaten origin dated to the 1600s or around 1700. Neither is settled, and both are reported here rather than adjudicated.

What a modern chef changes

The exact same fermentation science a Noma fermentation lab now studies, run at home

Rung 5

Method

1. Use a dehydrator held at a low, steady temperature as the incubation chamber, a genuine, credible substitute for the warm, humid box professional producers use.
2. Try mixed legume tempeh, black soybean, mung bean or winged bean in place of, or alongside, plain soybean, following the same fermentation logic the 1945 Restaurant Six Hands Dinner used across its own seven course menu, tempeh treated as a technique and an ingredient family rather than one fixed product.
3. Press and crumble a portion of finished tempeh through the spice grinder for a fine, sandy tempeh crumb, a textural contrast against the whole sliced cake, in the same spirit as Chef Ragil's own tempeh purée service at that dinner.