SOTO

Soto, sroto, tauto or coto is a common dish to be found in various regional variations of Indonesian cuisine. It is a soup mainly composed of broth, meat and vegetables. The meats that are most commonly used are chicken and beef, but there are also variations with offal, mutton, water buffalo meat and pork. The soup is usually accompanied by rice or compressed rice cakes (ketupat or buras). Sotos are commonly differentiated by the meat ingredient in them, e.g. soto ayam (chicken soto) and soto daging (beef soto). Offal is a very common ingredient in soto, and is considered as a delicacy: the rumen (blanket/flat/smooth tripe), reticulum (honeycomb and pocket tripe), omasum (book/bible/leaf tripe) and the intestines are all eaten.

Other ingredients of soto include soon alternatively spelled as sohun (rice vermicelli), mung bean sprouts and scallion.

Soto spices include the following: shallot, garlic, turmeric root, galangal, ginger, coriander, salt and pepper.

Soto can have a clear broth, a yellow transparent broth (coloured with turmeric) or a milky coconut-milk broth.

Another way to classify sotos is by their regional style. Many metropolitan areas have their own regional soto versions:

1. Betawi soto, made of beef or beef offal, cooked in a whitish coconut-milk broth, with fried potato and tomato.
2. Bandung soto, a clear beef soto with daikon pieces.
3. Medan soto, a milky chicken soto, with the chicken pieces fried before being mixed with the other ingredients.
4. Banjar soto, spiced with lemongrass and sour hot sambal, accompanied with potato cakes.
   Makassar soto or coto Makassar, a beef and offal soto boiled in water used to wash rice, with fried peanut.
5. Madura soto or soto Sulung/soto Ambengan, made with either chicken, beef or offal, in a yellowish transparent broth.
6. Semarang soto, a chicken soto spiced with candlenut and often eaten with sate kerang (cockles on a stick)
7. Kudus soto, made with water buffalo meat due to local taboos of the consumption of beef.
8. Lamongan soto, a popular street food in various Indonesian metropolitan areas, a variation of the Madura soto.
9. Pekalongan soto or tauto Pekalongan, spiced with tauco (a fermented miso-like bean paste).
10. Banyumas soto or sroto Banyumas, made special by its peanut sambal.

The following accompaniments are often eaten alongside soto.
Stewed quail eggs or chicken eggs

• Cockles on a stick (sate kerang)
• Fried chicken giblets
• Prawn crackers, sometimes crushed and mixed with crushed fried garlic as koya in Madura soto
• Gnetum seed crackers (emping)
• Fried tofu or tempeh
• Potato cakes (perkedel)
  
  Condiments common to soto dishes include hot chili sauce (sambal), sweet soy sauce, fried shallot and lime.
  
  

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