Bakso

Bakso or baso is an Indonesian meatball, or a meat paste made from beef surimi. Its texture is similar to the Chinese beef ball, fish ball, or pork ball. The word bakso may refer to a single meatball or the complete dish of meatball soup. Mie bakso refers to bakso served with yellow noodles and rice vermicelli, while bakso kuah refers to bakso soup served without noodles.

Bakso can be found all across Indonesia, from street vendors to high-class restaurants. Along with soto, satay, and siomay, bakso is one of the most popular street foods in Indonesia. Today, various types of ready-to-cook bakso are also available as frozen foods sold in supermarkets in Indonesia. It is usually eaten with noodles.

The name bakso originated from bak-so (肉酥, Pe̍h-ōe-jī: bah-so͘), the Hokkien pronunciation for "fluffy meat" or "minced meat". This suggests that bakso has Indonesian Chinese cuisine origin. Chinese influences is apparent in Indonesian food, such as bakmi, mie ayam, pangsit, mie goreng, kwetiau goreng, bakso, and lumpia. Indeed, bakso texture is quite similar to Chinese beef balls, which is quite fluffy and has homogenous texture. Although bakso has Chinese Hokkien origin name, culinary experts suggests that it is likely that bakso was the mixture of culinary influences back in colonial Dutch East Indies. Also in Indonesian, the term bola daging is often refers to Western or European style of meatballs, which is different in texture and elasticity compared to bakso. For example, Swedish meatballs are translated as bola daging Swedia in Indonesian. The soup and the noodles probably originated in China, but the meatball, may have come from the Dutch, who co

Bakso is commonly made from finely ground beef with a small quantity of tapioca flour and salt, however bakso can also be made from other ingredients, such as chicken, pork, fish or shrimp. Unlike other meatball recipes, bakso has a consistent firm, dense, homogeneous texture due to the polymerization of myosin in the beef surimi.lonized Indonesia in the 19th century.

Indonesia has developed numerous bakso variants, usually differing in shape, size, texture, ingredients, and fillings.

• Bakso aci: meatball with more tapioca content
• Bakso ayam: chicken bakso
• Bakso babi: pork meatball
• Bakso bakar: grilled and skewered bakso, prepared in a similar fashion to satay
• Bakso beranak: big meatball filled with small meatballs
• Bakso bola tenis tennis ball-sized bakso, either filled with hard boiled egg as bakso telur or filled with tetelan which includes pieces of spare beef meat and fat or urat (tendon).
• Bakso cuanki: a famous bakso in Bandung, West Java
• Bakso gepeng: flat beef bakso, it usually has finer and more homogenous texture
• Bakso goreng: fried bakso with a rather hard texture, usually consumed solely as a snack or mixed in one bowl as part of bakso Malang or bakso cuanki
• Bakso ikan: fish bakso (fish ball)
• Bakso keju: a modern variant of bakso, filled with either cheddar or mozarella cheese.