nopia — Central Java, Indonesia

Nopia is a small baked pastry with a thin, almost hollow shell that shatters into flakes, wrapped around a dark, sticky filling of palm sugar cooked down with sautéed onion. The onion filling is the more common version, though some bakers swap it for other pastes such as cempedak fruit or chocolate. It is reported from Banyumas, in Central Java, where it has long been sold in the town of Sokaraja and carried home by travelers passing through the region as a packable sweet that keeps for days without refrigeration. To prepare it, a stiff dough of flour and water is rolled thin, wrapped around a ball of the palm-sugar-and-onion filling, and shaped into a small dome. Bakers commonly cook the pastries stuck to the inner wall of a clay jar-shaped oven called a jubung, heated from below with wood or coconut-husk embers, which puffs the shell and leaves it dry and light rather than dense. What distinguishes this sweet is the contrast between the brittle, almost weightless crust and the dense, savory-sweet filling inside — the onion keeps the palm sugar from tasting purely sugary, giving it a background bite closer to caramelized shallot than plain caramel. Bakeries vary the ratio of onion to sugar and the thickness of the shell from batch to batch.