Mi Gomak — North Sumatra, Indonesia

Mi gomak is a noodle dish from the Batak communities around Lake Toba in North Sumatra, built on a thick, spaghetti-like noodle called mie lidi rather than the thin wheat noodles common elsewhere on the island, served either in soup or fried dry. It is reported chiefly from the Toba Batak area and the neighboring Sibolga and Tapanuli coast, where it is eaten as an everyday meal at warungs and home tables rather than as a festival dish. A ground spice paste of shallots, garlic, ginger, turmeric and chili is fried until fragrant, then simmered in coconut milk with andaliman pepper — a citrusy, numbing Batak spice — to build the broth; the thick noodles are boiled separately until tender, then combined with the broth or, for the dry version, tossed straight in the fried paste. The noodle itself, closer in thickness to spaghetti than to standard Indonesian egg noodles, along with the numbing andaliman pepper, is what distinguishes this dish from mie Aceh in the neighboring province, which uses thinner noodles and skips the andaliman.