A story from the Domingo Club, about a sumptuous trip to Indonesia to the rhythm of the mycelium’s teachings.

A few months ago, MOMENT asked us to write about our trip to Indonesia, where we first went to take part in a design festival and then stayed as long as our visa allowed to discover all we could about our favourite food, tempeh. Antoine immediately said yes! He really wanted to keep a record of the trip, an archive of the adventure, and writing the story seemed the way to go, even if it wasn’t an easy exercise.

MOMENT is a trans-local magazine for those who explore the new roles of our cities while working in the intersections of various disciplines and neighborhoods.

So here we are, the essay has been written and published in Japanese in Moment Magazine and now also in English on our website. We really hope you’ll enjoy reading it and discovering more about Bali, Java, fermentation, our way of thinking and the slow way to a happy life.

Chapters

• You have new mail in your inbox
• The humidity level is as high as the beauty of this island
• Crispy, hot and spicy
• Open source design and decentralised fabrication
• Fermented gathering
• Deepening our relationship with Rhizopus
• We learn by doing, we care by sharing

You have new mail in your inbox

We were on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, on the coast of Portugal, when we heard the news. Before getting back on our bikes after crossing a small inlet that separates Spain from Portugal, we stopped at a beach for a picnic and a swim. Before getting back on the road, we checked our phones to see where we’d left off, and took the opportunity to check our emails in case there was any good news. And there it was, an email from the Fab Foundation telling us that we had been awarded a grant to travel to Bali, Indonesia, and an invitation to attend the annual global event of Fab Labs, those networked fabrication laboratories. We leave in three weeks.
This news was a sign of destiny for us. Although we were on holiday and on our way to Porto, a strange feeling began to arise. A feeling split between the enjoyment of the cycling trip we were on and all the kilometres of adventure and stories we had left to tell, and the mind that was slowly starting to travel towards Indonesia, sending up curious and warm thoughts about a country we’d dreamed of discovering and which meant so much to us. For just over two years, Maud and I had been working together on a project that combined design thinking with the transformation of our food system. We had devoted almost all our physical and mental energy to the project of teaching people a new way of eating, one that would be excellent for our health and our environment, one that could be applied in the four corners of the globe by combining local resources and mushrooms.

The superfood that will enable us to make this shift already exists. It uses the root system of the Rhizopus fungus on soya beans to produce an excellent fermented product with a balanced taste of nuts and mushrooms, and is as high in protein as beef. Discovering this food was a revelation for us. The fermentation process is fascinating to watch: in just two days, the carefully inoculated mushroom spores spread over the soya beans or other legumes to form a compact, white block that is soft to the touch. It smells fresh and tastes delicious when cooked. It’s called tempeh and it’s native to the island of Java in Indonesia, where it’s been eaten by locals as an alternative to meat for hundreds of years. We wanted to share this practice of fermentation with as many people as possible as a way of tackling global warming, so that everyone can reduce their carbon footprint by cutting down on meat consumption, but also discover the elegant power of the mycelium, the hidden dimension of fungi, and their ability to transform things.

The humidity level is as high as the beauty of this island

We arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia, on a hot and humid night, as they all are in the tropics. We had a large backpack with clothes and our computers, we didn’t really know what to take in our suitcases, it was our first trip to Asia. It was that first night, on a stopover for a few hours while we waited for our flight to the island of Bali, wet from the ambient air, that we were confronted for the first time with Indonesian tempeh. These were tempeh crisps, sold in a small airport shop. The packaging wasn’t very appealing, and the packet was placed at the bottom of the shelf as an unpopular product, even though it was sold in a place frequented by travellers. It was greasy and somewhat disgusting, but we ate every last crisp, amazed at the fact that there really was tempeh everywhere here, right down to the bottom of the shelf in this little shop. In Barcelona, where we live, tempeh could sometimes be found in the fridge of certain organic shops, but was not very accessible due to its price.

We arrived in Bali at coffee time. The light was sublime and filled us with a good morning mood, despite the hectic night’s travel. The welcome was flowery and smiling, and the area around the airport was green and reassuring. As we left Europe, the climate crisis was in the headlines - each summer is hotter and drier than the last - and the message was clear: we must change our ways of living if we are to continue to enjoy a mild environment that offers us fresh air, clean water and rich, generous soil. But despite the clarity of the message, there has been little action, only hypocrisy and greenwashing in the programme of political and industrial meetings. Of course, the climate crisis we are experiencing is global and affects the whole world without exception, but when we arrived in Bali, that feeling gradually left us, as if we had just landed in a different reality.

After dropping off our backpacks at a hostel near Canggu, a small seaside town in Bali, we walked to what was to be our supper, breakfast and dinner combined, as only the previous day’s crisps were still floating around in our digestive systems. We came across a small restaurant with a free buffet where the plate is weighed to determine its price. It was a warung, a small restaurant run by a family. There are lots of them in Bali. There was a large terrace in front of the warung, where people would arrive on scooters to eat with friends. Under a pergola, the buffet was filled with small dishes prepared with love and delicacy, more than half of which were vegan. It had been 4 years since we stopped eating meat and other animal products in order to drastically reduce our carbon footprint, and despite the fact that the practice is becoming more and more popular in Europe, it wasn’t that common to come across good vegan food in restaurants. Balinese nature is so generous with fruit and veggies of all shapes and colours, and spices full of flavour, that the cuisine has been strongly inspired by it and is therefore deliciously healthy. On the upper level of the buffet, at eye level, were a number of tempeh-based dishes marinated in various ways, whether savoury, fruity or spicy. I filled my plate very generously and asked for some fresh coconut water to accompany it. Each preparation was like a little firework of flavours in my mouth, as new tastes exploded and danced with others, I began to fall in love with this island.

It was truly inspiring to see this source of fermented plant protein accessible to everyone. It was precisely for this feeling that we started our Domingo Club project. By imagining a world where everyone would have access to quality food that respects the environment and keeps us healthy.

Crispy, hot and spicy

Our first few days consisted of surfing sessions, walks and scooter rides, relaxation and meditation, a bit of writing and design for Domingo Club and discoveries of warungs, to whoever had the best tempeh. The annual Fab Labs event was just around the corner and we couldn’t wait to discover all the people behind the different labs. A Fab Lab is a fabrication laboratory, a place where new ideas can be easily prototyped and made physical. Fab Labs are equipped with digital fabrication machines, which can be controlled by a programme read by a computer to make objects. If this programme is shared, another fablab somewhere else on earth can also manufacture this object, and therefore make it multiple without having to physically move it. Fab Labs live by the idea that bits move around but atoms stay put. Competing with centralised industry, which consumes huge amounts of resources and only works on a very large scale. Fab Labs want to democratise and decentralise the fabrication of goods, to give power back to the people.

We were staying in a small hostel found on airbnb in the village of Dalung. A small family team looked after the house. While the father cleans the pool, the daughter carefully prunes the plants in the garden. We learned how to drink coffee Balinese style, how to repair Maud’s shoe with a large needle and thread, all the good addresses in the region, and how to enjoy the little things in life. One afternoon when I was sharing a coffee with the owner, he asked me what I was doing for a living. What a surprise it was for him to learn about our Domingo Club project, and to discover that it was tempeh that had brought me to him. That it was tempeh that brought a European to Indonesia. You should know that Indonesians don’t always like tempeh. They eat a lot of it when they’re children, because being soft and boneless it’s a less dangerous source of protein than chicken, but they start eating meat as soon as their bodies and their wallets allow it. In Indonesia, tempeh is mainly seen as an economical alternative to meat, not yet as an ecological solution. The manager waved to his wife and asked her for something in Bahasa Indonesia before resuming our pleasant chat. A few minutes later she came back from the market with a plastic bag and a big smile. They offered us a tasting of the different ways of cooking tempeh in Bali. It was crispy, hot and spicy. Crunching a chilli before taking a bite of fried tempeh awakens a sumptuous sensation in the mouth. Maud had joined me for the tasting, and together we shared stories of tempeh from around the world. We were following a lot of tempeh makers on social media and discovering new ways of fermenting tempeh with a wide variety of legumes every day. And not just with soya, as is traditional in Indonesia. The couple were amazed to learn that their cultural heritage was being recognised around the world and that it was inspiring a new generation of people who were curious about natural processes and wanted their protein source to do no harm to their environment.

Open source design and decentralised fabrication

The international Fab Lab event had begun. We were now in the south of the island, in Jimbaran, where the weather was very hot. The programme of the Bali Fab Fest, the official name of the event, is made up of workshops, conferences and a design challenge, all spread over ten days. This annual global gathering of Fab Labs is a great opportunity to meet all the players in this new generation of designers, engineers and makers who are trying to move our society towards greater resilience, circularity and local, decentralised practices. It’s the perfect place to exchange ideas, see if they resonate, and grow them with the help of the community.

We had the opportunity to present our work and research to an attentive audience looking for innovative ideas that combine technology and natural systems. Here it is: To make tempeh at home, and not be dependent on supermarkets and their increasingly expensive processed products, we need a warm, humid climate. In just two days, the Rhizopus fungus transforms beans into protein-rich tempeh. In this way, local beans are transformed into a protein-rich, easily digestible superfood. To maintain this constant heat in places other than the tropics, we designed an incubator. An incubator is a device consisting of a heating and cooling system to maintain an ideal temperature for the growth of its contents. In our case, because we designed it to ferment food, we call it a fermenter. We imagine our fermenter in everyone’s kitchen. A device with an aesthetic focus, to please the eye; a sustainable focus, so that every component is well thought out in terms of its production and recycling; an ergonomic focus, so that the fermentation process is as easy as possible; and a hacker focus, inspired by Fab Lab principles, so that everyone can make it their own to repair, improve, understand and share. The more people ferment at home and produce plant proteins locally, the less CO2 we will release into the atmosphere.

And we also took part in a challenge. The team that Maud and I were part of for the design challenge was given the task of helping small coffee and cocoa growers in the region of Pupuan. Small farmers can’t compete with the industrial locomotive. Their workforce is limited because young people are not attracted to farming, but their work requires a lot of manual labour and industrial machinery would be too expensive and would damage their natural, hilly land. They needed low-tech and hand tools that could be built locally with local resources, machines that could be maintained by the users and shared by all small producers, technology that would put smiles back on the faces of the farming world. Resilience.
After meetings with farmers, field visits and discussions with everyone involved, we spent the next seven days in our workshop as a team brainstorming, designing, prototyping and testing possible solutions. Our solution to controlling weeds in cocoa fields, without the need for heavy and dangerous machinery, was to use mats made from a coconut fibre biomaterial, which would be placed at the base of the plants to prevent weed growth. To address the high price of coffee due to poor bean sorting by quality, we designed a manual wooden machine that sorts objects by size using gravity and custom measurements. Both solutions were well received by local farmers, who were happy to have new answers to their old problems. Our team won the Bali Fab Fest Challenge, allowing the solutions to move into larger field testing. Further prototypes will be needed, but now the users themselves hold the key to modifying our proposed solutions. That’s the magic of design dialogue combined with rapid prototyping, and I hope we can repeat this kind of mission soon to help more communities in need.

Fermented gathering

When the Bali Fab Fest ended, we took a boat to the small, motor-free island of Gili, where everything is done on foot, by bike, or on horseback, in stark contrast to Bali’s noisy scooters. During a bike ride we met Uncle Hero, who as well as running his magnificent restaurant in the shade of the tamarisk trees, gives cooking lessons to anyone who wants to try the local cuisine. He bases his lessons on various Indonesian islands, each with its own unique culinary style. We were delighted with the idea, but asked him if he could do a special version of his workshop for us: one where tempeh replaces meat in all the dishes. He was immediately thrilled by our request. He comes from the island of Lombok, where a large number of tempeh producers live. He loves tempeh, and ferments it himself for his own consumption. We were immediately taken with his character. He’s passionate, smiling and very creative. Over the course of the evening, we cooked and tasted about ten dishes using tempeh mixed with ginger, turmeric, chilli, garlic, coconut and peanuts, to name but a few. Uncle Hero taught us that tempeh is a blank canvas that can be painted with a multitude of ingredients. That it can be given every imaginable texture. With countless cooking techniques and legume varieties forming its base, tempeh offers an endless array of flavor combinations. Our interest in this superfood only grew.

Back on the Island of the Gods, we met up with Driando Ahnan-Winarno and his team, along with local tempeh enthusiasts in Ubud. Driando is the founder of the Indonesian Tempe Movement. An association that promotes tempeh in Indonesia and beyond. As tempeh is a simple and inexpensive (but formidably effective) product, it is generally seen as a product for people who can’t afford meat. One of the association’s challenges is to show Indonesians a different image of tempeh, one that is sometimes more sophisticated, a different way of cooking it, a different way of fermenting it. To ensure that Indonesians can take pride in their national food and enjoy the economic benefits of a world-famous product. The Indonesian Tempe Movement and I have been exchanging ideas remotely for some time, so it was great to meet in person over a delicious meal. We talked about how we could work together to change the current food system to one based on plants and fungi. In the days following our meeting, Driando presented his vision at the G20, the 2022 intergovernmental summit. A vision of a world where tempeh would be known around the world, helping us out of the climate crisis and poor health. He even showed off one of our projects and his presentation, a special necklace we designed that allows people to grow mycelium and ferment tempeh using their body heat.WWv It always amazes me how mycelium has the art of connecting people, how the spores can be scattered on the wind, waiting for the right conditions to develop and flourish. Mycelium teaches us patience, wisdom, the sharing of knowledge and resources, and of course the art of collaboration.

Bali has taught us so much, and we will be eternally grateful. The tropical plants all seem to be living their best lives, the people are smiling all the time, the waves caress the shores all day long, everyone is making the things they need and then repairing them to make them last a little longer. Bali is a fantastic island. But this little paradise comes at a price: mass tourism. While the curious from all over the world come to enjoy this gentle way of life, the rivers fill up with rubbish after every rain, which then flows into the ocean filling this natural wonder with micro-plastics. Property developers swap bits of jungle for resorts, reducing wildlife in favour of CO2-addicted humans in bermuda shorts. Being part of this situation raised a lot of questions for us, and Maud and I talked about it regularly between us. We didn’t want to take more from the island than we could offer, we wanted to respect the natural balance. To give, to receive, to conserve, to learn, to share, to cultivate, to respect. I hope we succeeded.
With flowers in our eyes, we took off for the island of Java, where we had planned a masterclass in tempeh fermentation with Amita, a Dutchman who has lived in the Yogyakarta region for many years, after spending most of his life in Australia.

Deepening our relationship with Rhizopus

Amita is the region’s tempeh specialist. Although he is not Indonesian, his personal practice and his commitment to local communities make him a recognised expert. He works alongside a large number of tempeh makers and manufactures machines to help artisans in their daily task of tempeh production. His most prized product is a motorised machine that removes the skin from the soya bean and splits it in two, enabling better fermentation of the tempeh. Such a machine helps artisans to increase their production volume and the quality of their product, enabling them to achieve higher incomes and improve their quality of life. Amita loves sharing his passion for tempeh. He has observed many productions, both failures and successes, and the cause of these results. Tempeh makers from all over the world come to him to learn how to launch a successful production. And we went, too, wanting to deeply understand tempeh fermentation, from raw material selection to daily mycelium growth, incubation, and market sale in Indonesia’s natural climate. Our idea in following Amita’s Tempeh Masterclass was not to start our own tempeh production, but to understand how the whole world could do it themselves. What were the key factors for successful fermentation that our fermenter needed to achieve in order to guarantee healthy products for everyone.

During these few days with Amita, we were able to meet various tempeh makers with very different practices. One family produces some of the best tempeh in the region, managing to produce a large daily quantity with only 4-5 people working. The father, a tempeh maker for many years and himself the son of a tempeh maker, can tell if the soya beans are cooked enough by the smell emanating from the large pot in which the soya is boiling. The sons move the tempeh from one shelf to another to take advantage of a gentle late afternoon breeze to ensure the ideal temperature for the many blocks of tempeh. I find these anecdotes fascinating, not only because they teach us about the art of making tempeh, but also because they tell us the story of a human being who has been practising an art long enough to master it completely. Experience makes technological assistance obsolete. A good nose and the ability to read the air currents are enough to ensure exceptional production. But until then, technology can help us to produce our food locally.

Another fascinating encounter was with a group of women who produce tempeh daily for the whole community. They get together and prepare their food collectively, taking the time to do it well and to share with their peers. They know that time is the most precious thing we have. Their setup is minimal, the important thing is community resilience and the space for sharing that they have created between themselves. We were so inspired by these meetings. From the start, the aim of the Domingo Club has been to encourage as many people as possible to reclaim their kitchens, ferment at home, have fun and discover the benefits of good nutrition for physical and mental health. We believe the best way to achieve this is through community support and positive dynamics, rather than the dictates of a new company. To keep things simple and organic, to give everyone the tools to join the movement, regardless of their initial experience.
Our lessons and discussions with Amita helped us to understand the ideal conditions for the growth of mycelium. Environmental conditions such as the temperature and humidity of the air, but also the conditions of the substrate such as its level of acidity and its level of cooking. But also to remember that the environment around us is constantly changing, whether it’s the water we use to cook the beans, the air that circulates around us during inoculation, and all the little things it contains that we don’t see, such as bacteria, seeds and spores of other fungi. The season in which we ferment, or the phase of the Moon. Our world dances around us, and so our practice of fermentation must dance with it, in order to be in symbiosis and collaborate with the different elements. We have to stay awake, aware, observe our environment and be part of it. This practice of fermentation, which was originally a practical, somewhat playful way of eating, turns out to be a fascinating, holistic lesson in life. Like mycelium connecting trees to enable forest communication, all the concepts are closely linked and interconnected, resulting in a complete practice in which nothing can be excluded.

We learn by doing, we care by sharing

On our return to Barcelona, we modified the design of our fermenter device to simplify it, based on the many observations and advice we had received during our trip. The tool now works better, is simpler to use and manufacture, and therefore costs less. You can find more information about it on our website. We started a series of tempeh fermentation workshop to share the newly acquired knowledge with as many people as possible, inspired by the good vibe, beauty and simplicity of Indonesia. Because with it comes the whole new practice of care for both yourself and the planet. We also started a fermentation club, a monthly gathering where new and old friends share a common practice, talk about it and share experiences. Together we learn by doing, we care by sharing.
The mycelium connects us all, plants nourish us respectfully, wisdom is listened to and knowledge is shared. We wish you a wonderful journey on our beautiful planet Earth and please let us know if your path takes you to Barcelona, we’d welcome you with great pleasure.

Antoine Jaunard, for Domingo Club,
written in 2024, from memories of a 2022 trip.

Thanks to Yumiko Matsumaru for the feedback, management and lovely exchanges, to Ryota Kamio and Ryo Shirai for making the publication possible.

Send us your feedback, comment, ideas to hola@domingoclub.com