How Reculture Foods Is Making Indonesian Tempeh a Bay Area Staple
Melati Citrawireja and Feby Boediarto met through a shared love of Indonesia’s favorite fermented soybean: tempeh. They’ve now launched Reculture Foods, a tempeh business to bring the nutty flavors of their favorite food to the Bay Area. Just this spring Reculture was accepted to the La Cocina incubator program. Someday, if they’re lucky, Citrawireja and Boediarto would like their tempeh to be the go-to for restaurants, a staple at Berkeley Bowl.
No matter the outcome, the business is the duo’s language to comprehend their Indonesian ancestry and their friendship, and, now, a larger entry point into the Bay Area’s food landscape. “A big aspect is spreading Indonesian stories and culture,” Citrawireja says. “I feel like it’s a blank spot for most people around here. Just that for me would be success.”
The two met thanks to their presences in the Bay’s smaller-than-you’d-think Indonesian American community. Citrawireja is well-loved for her food writing and photography (disclaimer: I’ve known her for the better part of a decade and she shot the wedding photos for my wedding!). Her newsletter Three Salted Fish got on Boediarto’s radar. At the time, she was running a DIY tempeh subscription service, also called Reculture, which is where their business gets its name. It was her pandemic-era hobby, Boediarto’s equivalent of sourdough bread baking, but with an eye toward tapping into her family’s roots. “I truly couldn’t find tempeh that was reminiscent of what my mom would make,” Boediarto says. “I called her and she said ‘Why don’t you just do it on your own?'”
Needless to say they were fangirling over each other. A mutual friend introduced them in 2021. Now they’re exploring their Indonesian heritage through tempeh together, deciding to revive Reculture as a joint project in mid-2023. They applied to the La Cocina small business incubator program, a women of color and migrant-focused nonprofit based in San Francisco.
The two see this business as a way of continuing their identity exploration. They ventured to Indonesia together and have been dancing in the Bay’s own Gamelan Sekar Jaya for years. As they began this business in serious, Citrawireja learned her great-grandmother was a tempeh maker; Boediarto, for her part, is applying cost calculators for the first time to her parents’ old school recipes. They only began the program at La Cocina in May 2024, with the official launch just a few months in the bag. Still, La Cocina is a fertile ground for that work as the businesses. There’s a big facility for packaged food and experts on consumer-packaged goods (CPG) at their disposal.
For now, Reculture is available by contacting the business through their website or at events like an upcoming night market at La Cocina on November 15th. The subscription service is just about maxed out as the two ramp up for a larger expansion in winter 2025. In the meantime they join a swelling roster of peers in the organization — Reem Assil‘s restaurants, ever-amplifying Arab voices in food, and highly acclaimed chef Nite Yun who just appeared on Netflix’s Chef’s Table amongst the storied graduates — who also center their ancestries, their legacies across the globe. “It’s deeply tied to our family’s stories,” Boediarto says. “Our family came with us on this journey. It’s hard to ignore that history and timeline.”
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