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Countless foreigners travel to Indonesia to find a slice of paradise. For chef Chris Salans, bliss comes in the form of the archipelago’s myriad exotic ingredients.

“It’s like a painter who has just been given a whole new palette of colors,” he said. “It’s become a new source of inspiration and motivation to cook.”

Salans, the chef and owner of Mozaic Restaurant Gastronomique in Ubud, Bali, has just written a cookbook featuring his unique blend of French cuisine fused with Indonesian ingredients. For this self-defined “ingredient-driven chef,” Indonesia is a treasure trove.

“Indonesia consists of over 17,000 islands,” the 41-year-old said. “Each one has its own unique set of ingredients and flavors.”

The half-French, half-American chef first came to Indonesia in 1995 and has since made Ubud his home — he lives with his Indonesian wife and their three children. In September, Salans launched his first cookbook, “Mozaic: French Cuisine, Balinese Flavors” in Jakarta.

“The book is for Mozaic lovers by a Mozaic chef,” he said. “But it’s also about Indonesia and the ingredients it has to offer.”

It took Salans a year to finish the book, working with writer Diana Darling and photographer Philippe Heurtault.

“It’s probably my first and last cookbook,” he said. “I can’t say it’s as painful as giving birth. But it was just as pleasant.”

The 144-page book includes a list of exotic fruits and spices that Salans has encountered during his 16 years on Bali. He incorporates these ingredients into French cuisine served at Mozaic, where the menu embodies his expansive knowledge of palates and culinary experience. Forty of his recipes are featured in the book.

Born in Washington, D.C., Salans was raised in his mother’s native Paris from the age of two. It was her French home cooking that inspired Salans to cook professionally.

Salans attended the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and worked for a number of Michelin-starred restaurants in France and the United States before coming to Indonesia. In the mid-90s, he arrived to set up the kitchen team of The Legian suites in Bali.

“There are two important ingredients in cooking: sweat and love,” he said. “At most warungs and restaurants, they cook it with sweat; those cooks slaving away at the kitchen. But at home, we cook it with love.”

His own restaurant was established in 2001. Within three years, Mozaic was recognized by the prestigious European culinary association Traditions & Qualite as a member of “Les Grandes Tables du Monde” (“The Great Tables of the World”), joining an exclusive membership among the most acclaimed of restaurants.

The chef serves four different kinds of menus at Mozaic. The most challenging is called the “Discovery Menu,” where guests are invited to sniff, touch and scrape the six different fresh ingredients served on a platter, upon which the meal will be based.

“I find new ingredients all the time,” Salans said. “At Mozaic, we have one staff member whose job is to find new ingredients. So, the staff and I go to the markets, seashores and jungles and ask if there’s anything weird that the children are eating. We even go knocking on people’s doors.”

One of Salans’ featured ingredients is tamarind. “In Indonesia, they mainly use it for rujak (traditional fruit salad),’’ he said. “Rujak is everywhere on every island.”

For Salans’ version of rujak, he mixes tamarind with yabi (freshwater lobster), diced papaya, mango, pineapple and salak (snake fruit).

Salans’ cookbook is also themed around the fruits and spices that grow in his own backyard at home, one of which is the exotic belimbing wuluh (starfruit).

“It’s something that my mother-in-law uses to cook sayur asam (traditional sweet and sour soup) and ayam garang asam (chicken marinated in sweet sour sauce),” he said. “But I’ve tried and had never been able to use it for French cuisine.”

But when a friend of Salans came to visit and eat at Mozaic, he said that he had eaten foie gras with belimbing wuluh at a restaurant in New York City.

“I’m like, what!?” Salans said. “In New York City, you’ll probably have to import them at $100 per kilogram, and here they’re dropping unused in my backyard.”

The chef confined himself to the kitchen to experiment. About a month later, he had created pan-seared foie gras with sweet and sour belimbing wuluh broth.

“What I did was to confit the belimbing wuluh in a syrup and let it sit for three to four days so that the sweetness of the syrup mixes with the belimbing wuluh, and the acidity of the belimbing wuluh mixes into the syrup. We then take the broth and mix it with chicken stock and serve it with foie gras.”

Salans said that the dish was popular at the food-tasting that accompanied the book launch. “We could see that the belimbing wuluh’s unique, strong flavors blended well and resulted in a delicate relish that was sweet and sour.”

Another challenging ingredient that he has incorporated into his menu is the peppercorn.

“In Indonesia, there are a lot of peppercorns,” Salans said. “There are fresh green peppercorns, black peppercorns, white peppercorns, comet-tail peppercorns from Java and andaliman peppercorns from Sumatra.”

Salans did the unthinkable, marrying the spicy green peppercorns of Bali with chocolate mousse, where the rich flavors of Valrhona chocolate are piqued with the slightly spicy tang of the peppercorn.

“Cocoa is strong and covers your palate, so when you bite into the peppercorn [in jelly form] it wouldn’t taste so spicy,” he said.

The chef admits that it may take some time for novices to master his cookbook.

“I can’t say that all the recipes are easy,” he said. “There are maybe 50 percent of the recipes that you can do without experience. The other 50 percent you’ll have to practice several times before you get them right.”

The hardcover book is available at Kinokuniya and Periplus bookstores for Rp 350,000 ($39).

Chris Salans’ new cookbook includes 40 recipes that take advantage of the full array of ingredients the archipelago has to offer. Many of the book’s culinary offerings can be found at Salans’ Mozaic Restaurant Gastronomique on Bali, which he opened in 2001. (JG Photo/Sylviana Hamdani)