In Tolai, I asked our durian host a question. “If most people here are ethnically Balinese, and your parents moved here from Bali – who lived here before them?”
The Kaili people, he said.
Kaili is an umbrella term for the 13 different indigenous-language groups that still live in Sulawesi today, and their many sub-groups and dialects. But after a week in Sulawesi, it didn’t seem like we had met any of them. Where were the Kaili?
Then we booked a week at Dodoha Mosintuwu Cafe, Homestay and Community Center and realized the Kaili were all around us.
Dodoha Mosintuwu Homestay and Cafe
After a couple of rough nights in Tolai and Pendolo, checking in to the row of neat A-frames facing Lake Poso was like arriving to a Ritz-Carlton. I couldn’t quite believe the homestay existed here. It was so… clean. And so…neatly arranged. Instagrammable really.
I’d found the Dodoha Mosintuwu Homestay through an interview on YouTube with Lian Gogali, who founded Mosintuwu in 2009 as a women’s education center. The goal was to bring Christians and Muslims together into a shared community space. The organization’s name, Mosintuwu, means “Working Together.”
The organization expanded beyond the school to agricultural initiatives, tree-planting programs, and marketing for locally-grown products. Most community meetings take place in what is now a restaurant cafe, a sweeping bamboo dome constructed in 2010.
But on our first afternoon in Tentena, Lian and her husband Pian were heading out to a village meeting about an hour away with coffee farmers interested in introducing pollination bees for producing local honey.
Hearing their plans for the afternoon, I felt like we had found the right space to base ourselves to explore Tentena Poso and meet people within the community.
Then at lunchtime I checked out the cafe’s menu, and I knew we were in the right place.
The menu was extensive, with many local indigenous-style dishes and vegetables I had never heard of before. It was good we had booked a few nights, so we could try everything new to us (⬇️ scroll down for everything we ate!)
With Lian and Pian off to the village, we took a wander around the city looking for durian. It took us 10 minutes walking from Dodoha Mosintuwu to cross the northern bridge over Lake Poso and enter the town.
About Tentena City
Kota Tentena is a small city of about 15,000 people on the north banks of Lake Poso, North Pamona District. It is a strongly Christian area and despite its teeny size is the seat of the Central Sulawesi Christian Church.
Crossing the pedestrian bridge to town, we passed an old church and a large statue that I assumed was of Jesus Christ. I commented on it that night at dinner and Pian laughed.
“No, Lindsay,” he said. “That is a statue of Albert Christian Kruyt.”
Who?
Albert Christian Kruyt was born in East Java to a Dutch Calvinist missionary family. In 1892, 23-year-old Kruyt was sent to the Tentena Poso region to establish a new congregation.
“So was he a good guy or a bad guy?” I asked Pian.
“Good guy,” he said confidently. “Around here we will definitely say good guy.”
According to locals, Kruyt stopped intertribal warfare which included head-hunting. He asked the people to come down from the mountain tops, where they lived for safety from the incessant battles, and arranged for them to get land near the lake. With the new peace the tribes found prosperity as farmers, uniting under Kruyt’s congregation to become the Pamona People.
We stopped at a vegetable stall that had a stack of durians out front. In the distance I could see the statue that was actually Albert Christian Kruyt.
All of the durians in the pile looked the same. They must have come from the same tree.
A quick chat with the elderly shop-owner confirmed this – the durians had come from a tree in his backyard, just 10 minutes away in Sawidago Village.
The durian had a very thick creamy texture that tasted like honey nut cheerios – very sweet, very floral, and kind of plain.
It was tasty, but not enough to want to buy more of them. Plus, it didn’t seem that the shop owner had a good place to throw away the shells, so if we wanted another one and also wanted to be polite, we needed to carry the durian home.
Since we hadn’t finished our walk around Tentena yet we decided to wait for more durian the next morning when we hit up the Tentena Central Market.
Saturday at Tentena Central Market
On the very rainy next morning we packed into a steamy car with Lian and Pian and drove to the Tentena Central Market. Since it was a Saturday, it was extra busy.
While Lian picked up fresh tofu and tempe for the cafe in her own re-usable containers (so she didn’t have to bring home plastic bags) Richard and I stalked around looking for durians and Sulawesi wild fruits.
The market was full of durians wrapped in pyramids for easy transport.
We purchased a few bundles, chatted, and then slipped under the part of the market with a covered roof to get away from the rain.
I immediately spotted a couple of interesting things, including a boiled nut that I knew we had tasted somewhere else, but couldn’t think of the name of it.
“Kemunji,” the woman said.
Kamonci
At only 5,000 IDR per kong (cup) it was worth a try, whatever they were. The seeds had been boiled in salt water and the brown shells were soft like peeling the skin off a chestnut.
It had a very dense, very creamy texture and was slightly salty. I knew we had tasted these somewhere.
Then it hit me. These were the seeds of Artocarpus camansi, the breadnut.
We had seen the young fruits just about everywhere at the Central Market in Parigi. But I hadn’t seen anyone there selling the mature seeds pre-cooked.
Here at the Tentena Central Market, there were several sellers with them. These seeds are far more delicious than jackfruit seeds and the the best part was the sprout which had absorbed more of the salt and was extra creamy.
I wished afterwards that we had bought 2 kongs. Or maybe 3 kongs, since we could keep them for several days in the refrigerator.
Ketimba
Many vendors were selling this ginger fruit, which is really sour. It wasn’t my first time seeing it as it’s common in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo and other parts of Peninsular Malaysia as well. But usually we just see a couple of people selling them – Here, it seemed like almost every vendor had a two or three fruits on their blankets.
In Tentena, we learned, this fruits is called Ketimba. It’s the fruit cluster of a the torch ginger plant, Etlingera elatior (Bunga Kantan) and is commonly used in soups to give a light acid and floral flavor – especially fish soups.
These were very big in size, and the soup is a local favorite.
Ketimba Welesu
Next I spotted something that looked like really crappy, shriveled up rambutans. Since we hadn’t seen any rambutans at all this trip, I leaned in closer for a look, and realized these were definitely not rambutans.
What is it? I asked the seller. “Ketimba!” he boomed.
I pointed at the pink clusters of Ketimba on the blanket next to him. “But that’s Ketimba?”
Ketimba, he confirmed, Ketimba Welesu! It’s similar, but this one grows on the ground. Here, taste it. It’s sweet.
He cracked open the shell and revealed a 3-lobed, white-fleshed fruit with dark seeds. It had a soft, sweet texture similar to a dragonfruit or other cactus fruits and a similarly soft seed.
Do you cook this? I asked him.
No! he shouted above the sound of the rain. We just eat it! Like fruit!
We bought a kong of Ketimba Welesu too, and with our bundles of durians went back to Dodoha Mosintuwu for breakfast. Whatever this Sulawesi wild fruit was, I hoped to find it on Google.
Breakfast at Dodoha Mostintuwu
We returned to the homestay a bit moist. It was still raining heavily, making a mist over the lake and a pleasant muffled pounding on the palm leaf rooftop.
A table was set with cloth napkins and white tableware. Pian gestured to it – “your breakfast is ready.”
I was a bit taken aback. At the last hotel, breakfast consisted of a styrofoam box of plain fried rice flecked with green onion left on a chair outside our room in a plastic bag with plastic spoons. This was so upscale. And so eco.
Breakfast was fresh fruits with toast and Nutella or jam – perfect. As the rain came down, we enjoyed the watermelon, papaya, and home-grown dragonfruit and bananas with a cup of Sulawesi coffee – and of course our durians from the market!
We had some time before a cooking class we had booked for lunch and a meeting with a local community member who Lian said was knowledgeable about old durian trees.
So we ordered another cup of Pian’s Vietnamese coffee with Sulawesi beans and something called Dange, which I had never tasted before.
Dange
Dange is a sweet dessert made out of sago flour. It arrived steaming hot and toasty, with a cup of warm Gula Aren syrup made out of the Arenga pinnata tree. This syrup has a rich, salty, brown sugar flavor with darker hints like coffee and chocolate. It’s delicious.
I liked the toasted flavor of the sago combined with the filling – a mixture of toasted shredded coconut and more sugar – especially since it was served hot. It was a rich way to start the day and already so sweet we didn’t need the syrup on top.
I ended up mixing the syrup into the black coffee instead, which was a really, really, really delicious choice. Gula Aren in coffee is a must-try!
Cooking Classes at Dodoha Mosintuwu
In the small garden around the homestay, Lian and Pian collect native and local edible plants and these feature strongly in the cafe menu.
We started our cooking class with Woku, a yellow turmeric herbal soup made from the Arogo (Premna serratifolia) and Onco leaves (Spondias pinnata), which is the tree producing Kedongdong or Wi Apple fruits. I fully did not know you could eat the leaves of this plant too!
Lian is ethnically Mori – another indigenous tribe from the Pamona region – and she chose the Dwi Set for our first cooking class because it is one of the most popular foods of her people.
Making Dwi
“This is one of my favorite foods ever in the world,” she told us as she beat Dwi. ” Like people in Mori, we will eat Dwi every day. Every day. It is better than rice.”
Dwi is made out of the flour of sago trees, mixed with water into a thick, goopy starch. It is the same as ambuyat in Brunei and Sarawak.
The big difference is how you eat it. In Brunei, you eat with a slotted stick shaped like a Y, which you use to twist up the goop and then dip into various thick and spicy sauces.
With Dwi, we used silver grooved chopsticks to gather the starch like spinning wool, one chopstick in each hand. Then we placed the Dwi lump into the bowl of Woku soup.
Using the chopsticks, we slice the Dwi into gelatinous bite-sized chunks inside the soup bowl and coated each lump with the salty herbal soup, we then lifted it to the mouth with a chopstick in each hand.
It felt awkward and fun – and Lian was a fabulous teacher.
Making Ituwu
Our next cooking class item was Ituwu, which is a celebration food. At Dodoha Mosintuwu it needs to be ordered ahead of time as it requires building an outdoor fire. We got it at short notice because the staff were already having a party and they made an extra one for us.
The ingredients in Ituwu is fish and a lot of herbs, mixed by hand with salt, and then stuffed into a bamboo tube. The top of the tube is sealed with bunches of cassava and papaya leaves and placed over a fire. A man with bamboo tongs stands by to tend the fire and to rotate the bamboo, so everything steams evenly inside.
It takes a long time for Ituwu to cook, so after seeing how the ingredients were mixed together we left to go durian hunting with Pian.
The finished Ituwu would be waiting for us in the evening.
Durians of Tentena Poso
One of the best parts of staying at Dodoha Mosintuwu is how connected Lian and Pian are to the community.
That morning as we enjoyed our coffee, durians and Dange, several people stopped by to chat about various projects and we were fortunate enough to meet Pak Hajai, the Ketua (mayor) of Sawidago Village. I recognized the name of the village from the durian seller in town.
Is it season in Sawidago now? I asked Pak Hajai. Yes, he said. In fact, he had eaten durian only for breakfast that day, as he was also a durian lover.
Would he take us to see some old durian trees? Sure thing.
Desa Sawidago Durian Village
Following Pak Hajai and Pian on motorbike, we crossed the pedestrian bridge into Kota Tentena and then turned right over a little lump of hills, coming down into a flat-bottomed valley filled with rice fields. In the distance was a Christian church on the hillside surrounded by houses. This was Sawidago Village.
When Pak Hajai stopped, he pointed at all the hills in a circle around us. All of these hills, he said, is durians. These are Durian Hills.
As the Ketua, Pak Hajai knows just about everyone in Sawidago. His job is to help mitigate arguments and squabbles, support people in need, and deal with crisis. He’s also the keeper of oral history, tradition, and culture.
He brought us first to an old durian tree at the back of someone’s house. This tree, he said, was already enormous when he was a little boy 60 years ago. It was planted by the first generation of people who came down the mountain to join Albert Christian Kruyt, more than 100 years ago.
His people, he said, were the Bara-e Tribe. And their language was called Bara-e as well. The term Pamona, he explained, came quite a bit later, after the tribes were already united.
And in Bara-e language, they called Durian “Madu-e.”
Eating Madu-eh with Pak Hajai
From the old tree, we went up the hill a little higher and stopped at a farmhouse where a family was busy brushing leaves off the day’s durian harvest.
I admired the woven baskets tacked to the wall, where a chicken was nestled brooding her eggs. What a great idea.
The house was rustic but comfortable. I asked who lived in the house, and they said they only stayed there during the durian season. They also had a house next to the church I’d spotted on the hillside.
Pak Hajai asked to see the day’s durian harvest, and picked through the pile until he found what he was looking for. This was a man with obvious durian experience and finesse.
I was also interested to hear that the people were not speaking pure Bahasa Indonesia. I heard the word Madu-eh several times, and realized they were speaking the Bare-e language. Apparently the language was alive and well!
Once he’d found The One, he used a machete to pop it open. It made a satisfying crack, the super fresh shell popping open after one big tug.
Pak Hajai took the first piece and put the whole thing in his mouth, sucking with satisfaction and breathing in to let the flavors expand. I knew I liked this man.
Pian took the second, closing his eyes as he felt the strong aroma of the durian. Definitely a good guy.
Richard and I each took a piece, breathing in the sharp aroma. It was super rummy, super vanilla-ey, and so smooth and creamy it was like eating ice cream. It even felt cold, even though that was impossible.
This was the best durian we’d tasted so far in Sulawesi.
We asked to buy more durians from this tree, and walked away with a bundle of 3 durians that they tied for us on the spot.
Private Durian Feast
The sun was setting as we returned to Dodoha Mosintuwu. We settled cross-legged on the patio outside our room, a cool breeze coming from the lake. It was quiet and peaceful, with the loud buzz of insects and frogs and birds flapping around as black silihuettes against the setting sun.
We sat together, just the two of us. It felt as romantic as going to a fancy restaurant on Valentine’s Day, and was the first time in a long time that I had felt completely relaxed while eating durian together.
Every bite of that vanilla-rum durian was perfect. It was an incredible. It was unlikely. Maybe it would be hard to explain to other people, but that 30 minutes with the most perfect durian at sunset felt like the most amazing gift.
Ituwu
The sun set, the durians gone, we wandered back into the cafe area to see if the Ituwu was ready.
We were the only foreign guests that night and the cafe was filled with staff and friends from the community – all enjoying Ituwu together. It was a relaxed and festive feeling.
When we arrived they pulled out the tempe/tofu bamboo tube and dumped it out into a platter. The cassava and papaya leaves used to plug the tube were steamed as well, and Lian said we could eat them together with the super salty and herbal tempe/tofu.
Papaya leaves, she said, was also one of her favorites. Papaya leaves, papaya flowers – she loved it all.
It was a simple but satisfying way to finish the day, especially knowing we had one more day to try the papaya flowers.
Buah Jongi
The next morning, we walked to the neighbor’s house to visit a tree of Buah Jongi (Dillenia serrata) and make an Instagram Reel.
This fruit is endemic to Sulawesi and was on our trip bucket-list of things to do. After roaming around for a week, we’d seen plenty of trees in Tolai, but no fruits.
This tree still had plenty of them! They are one of the most beautiful fruits I’ve ever seen.
They are surprisingly juicey, the waxy skin easily breaking under the teeth with a gush of refreshingly citrusy juice. It was a bit sour, but no more sour than a Meyer lemon.
We gathered up the freshly fallen fruits and took them back to the cafe to try a local recipe for Jongi Juice.
Buah Jongi Juice
One of the staff brought out a blender, and showed us how she first washed the fruits, then dumped them into the blender with ice cubes. She pulsed a few times, a surprising amount of juice exploding out of the fruit. Then she spooned in some sugar, pulsed, tasted it, and added more sugar.
The final step was to strain out the black seeds and pieces of skin, leaving us with a creamy, sweet raspberry-flavored drink that reminded me a little bit of raspberry-flavored creamsicle drink.
It was so good. If I ever have a farm, I will definitely keep a Buah Jongi tree outside my window just to make this juice!
More Food at Dodoha Mosintuwu
Along with the Buah Jongi smoothie-juice, we sat down to taste more unfamiliar items on the Dodoha Mosintuwu menu.
Honestly there were just so many to try! We felt a little crazy as we ordered 5 more dishes. But luckily, the staff said the portions were small, so we were free to get a taste of a few more things before we had to leave.
Here’s what was new to us:
Sayur Lilin (Setaria Palmifolia)
Despite staying around SE Asia for 14 years as a plant-obsessed vegan, I had never heard of Sayur Lilin.
I was even more excited when I reliazed that this is a species of sugar cane with an edible starchy core.
It is most common in East Indonesian islands like Papua, Ambon, and Maluku – where I had never been. Since Sulawesi is the bridge between East and West Indonesia, and this was the furthest east we had ever traveled in Sulawesi, it made sense we hadn’t seen Sayur Lilin yet.
I loved this. The flavor was almost like a mild corn, and it had also sucked up all of the flavors in the soup. I would definitely be looking for Sayur Lilin on future trips.
Beko
We already knew we would like this, as it’s made from green bananas. After our durian trips in Zanzibar, Richard and I are big fans of green bananas and include them regularly in our cooking.
I had never seen them diced up this way, hacked apart by holding the uncooked unripe banana in one hand and lazily letting a knife drop into it over and over again until the banana literally fell apart.
The hacked up banana was then boiled with more Arogo and Onco as well as several other herbs into a deliciously filling stew.
Papaya Flowers
I still had Lian’s comment about the Papaya Flowers on my mind, and didn’t want to leave Dodoha Mosintuwu without trying them.
These were stir-fried with turmeric, and were actually my favorite from our last lunch set. They were salty and herbal with a very slight bitterness – I think Lian and I have similar taste buds!
All in all, it was an interesting and satisfying meal to end our trip to Tentena-Poso, and our amazing stay at Dodoha Mosintuwu.
How to visit Dodoha Mosintuwu
Staying at Dodoha Mostintuwu was a highlight of our Central Sulawesi trip and put us in touch with so many incredible people who let us into their farms to see wild fruits and durians.
We saw so much more than I could even fit into this blog post, and what we saw is just a drop in the bucket of what is there to see.
You can find Dodoha Mostintuwu on Instagram or Facebook, but in my experience they are not that actively checking messages there. They are also on Airbnb, but I was able to make a booking directly through WhatsApp to this number: +62 813-9079-5043
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