A job well done
Making tropical jams
The idea of preserves came about purely by accident.
Yip: I was living in Singapore and thought it would be nice not to just have strawberry jam at breakfast. I started looking for a good mango jam and realised there wasn’t one that captured the real flavour of mango. I don’t have a cooking background, but I enjoy food, so I went to the internet, randomly picked a recipe and made a mango jam with a Filipino mango. It was fantastic and I was totally inspired.
There was a lot of excitement and idealism at the start.
Yip: I didn’t know anything about jam-making, but I saw the potential of it. Still, it’s one thing to concoct something in your kitchen and quite another to start a production process. Had I known all the challenges we would go through, I might have been put off.
Learn from experimenting.
Whatever we’ve learned, we’ve learned this way. Bali’s ingredients are so good it draws chefs from all over the world, and we’ve been lucky to work with them on making sure we’ve got the amazing flavours from the fruit just right in our jams. Sometimes it’s small changes that affect the balance. The difference between 56% sugar and 58% sugar, for example, can be huge.
Little things matter a lot.
Making jam isn’t difficult, but the secret is the produce itself. We try to make sure that every single fruit we work with is the right variety, picked at the right time, grown in the best location we can find for it.
It often comes down to doing what seems the right thing.
Our kitchen is
based on a small farm in the highlands that’s very typically Balinese. We converted a traditional community space, a wantilan, into a kitchen. It’s very easy to say to a farmer, “Grow this because there’s a market for it,” but you’ve got to prove to them that someone will buy it. So we look at what’s happened in the past and work with that towards a future that makes sense for them.
But you can’t stem the march of progress.
Ten years ago Bali was pretty sleepy, and now there are places that are incredibly commercialised. It’s been an assault on a system that’s been in place for hundreds of years, and local people have had to adjust very quickly. We want to work out how to take longstanding traditions and at the same time allow people to progress and use those traditions in the modern world.
It’s a simple thing, but we do as much as we can to give people the opportunity not just to maintain their current way of life, but to choose the way they’d like to live. This means investing in people’s skills and offering a proper income, so they’re able to afford what the modern world provides. Once people see what a smartphone is and does, there’s no going back. You’ve got to give people a way to afford it without abandoning a certain way of life.
Awani means ‘earth’ in old Balinese sanskrit.
The Balinese feel a connection to the earth, believing it is the giver of life, that it provides the sustenance to support us and that in the end, when we die, we all return to the earth. It felt like the right name, and fitting because all our fruit comes from the earth. In everything we do, we’re trying to maintain the groundedness that’s at the core of Balinese life.