Bakso! Bakso!

Ever since I moved to Indonesia I’ve always loved eating bakso, it’s cheap, delicious, and quick to prepare. What else could you want in a meal? When choosing my project for LEAP it wasn’t a hard decision, I knew I wanted to make my own bakso, cart and all.

First we made a general rough design, and I’m not ashamed to say that our original design wasn’t great (We made a lot of changes). After getting a clearer picture of what I wanted, me and my crew used a great program called google sketch up to draw the cart in 3D. After a little practice I’ve gained some knowledge on how to use it.

Next was buying the materials, I was amazed at how cheap it is to buy decent quality wood in Indonesia. My group and I went to a local timber yard and hauled the wood back to school (With a little help from my bike). We started on the frame ASAP, finishing in about a week.

After finishing the frame we attached metal panelling to the inside for insulation, and then layered bamboo strips over the outside to hide the metal (It’s ugly). Using the nail gun we stuck the bamboo onto the frame, then we hand sawed the overhanging pieces off afterwards.

The last step in our whole bakso plan is selling the soup and making some cash, originally we wanted to sell it at the farmers market but why stop there? Since our stall is pretty mobile even though it doesn’t have wheels, (Too expensive) we could still sell it practically anywhere.

I’ve even been thinking about having it as a fourth snack option. It would be really cheap and super fast to serve, though I have my doubts about how popular it would be with western students. I think the Indonesian kids would love it. The idea to sell it on the street was brought up but I don’t think anyone would buy it and I would be a bit of a laughing stock with the locals.

Overall I’ve really enjoyed this project from start to finish, I felt motivated all the way through and while I didn’t always meet my deadlines, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t trying. I feel like I overestimated my abilities with the project due dates, next time I would definitely set more challenging but realistic goals.

The main problem was that when we started we had five people in our group, me, (Patrick) Gian, Ihno, Clay, and Nicole. But after the second week most of the group had disbanded for various reasons, and the remaining group was just me and Clay. We really had unlucky timing for the bakso cart because it was right in the middle of the Indonesian national exams, meaning our real bakso experts were away.

I think that this project fit quite well with the LEAP program, but the other big problem was that we sometimes had no access to the materials we needed, I spent hours scouring the area just to find some wheels and a metal pot with a ladle. Not the most complicated things, but we definitely had more resources now than in past GS projects that I’ve worked on.

Thanks for reading, I hope I’ve inspired some other people to create their own bakso carts for everyone to enjoy.