In Jakarta, you smell sate before you see it, a blanket of sweet and savory that rides the breeze. Aroma turns to smoke, thick and curling. With the air pushing 95°F, it shouldn’t feel so inviting. You approach anyway, the haze giving way to blazing coals. Doesn’t matter. You get close enough to sweat. Or rather, sweat more.

That’s when the show begins. Young men in a fiery choreography of meat, sticks and flame, grilling majorettes if you will. Each stands above a trough-like grill laden with a tight row of skewered meats, mostly beef, chicken and lamb. There’s usually a fan stoking the coals, sometimes electric, sometimes woven fronds waved by hand.

Grabbing the skewers in bundles of dozens, the cooks flip and twirl them, keeping them in motion to ensure just the right ratio of char to tender-juicy. Order—always by batches of 10, usually $1.75 a bundle—and the cook will slosh them with a fresh coat of sauce that drips and sputters onto the coals, then wrap them in paper.

This is life on the streets of the Indonesian capital, home by some estimates to tens of thousands of vendors plying sate. They line the streets, their carts and grills clogging traffic. People don’t mind.

Eat your way across the city’s sate scene and a theme emerges. All delicious, but all tasting mostly benignly the same. Sweet and savory with hits of lemon grass and peanut. Some sauce it more, some less. Some char it more, some less. But I wanted sate that stopped me, that demanded I buy not 10 or 20, but 30 or 40.

Eventually, I found it. And oddly, soup ended up being the secret.

Soto Tangkar Kerajinan 46 is tucked under a green tarp that stretches out from a corner building on Kerajinan Street. Sate is cooked in the street at the edge of the tarp, but the real action occurs at the back. That’s where a cook prepares soto, a soup in which a boldly rich coconut-­based broth is as much the star as the beef cooked in it.

Soto is an assembled soup, meaning the meat is cooked in that broth—coconut milk, ginger, turmeric, chilies, garlic, pureed cashews, nutmeg, bay leaves, makrut lime leaves, galangal, kecap manis, tons of lemon grass—then pulled out. To serve, the meat is chopped and mounded into bowls with chopped fresh tomatoes and scallions to taste, then the broth is ladled over.

I tried a bowlful and can attest that the broth was as impressively flavorful as that ingredient list implies. I then tried their sate, which was tender, juicy, charred and gorgeously lacquered. When I tasted it, I realized this was no typical sate. In fact, it tasted almost identical to the bowl of soto I’d just finished.

Of course, explained the cook, who goes only by Mr. Miyanto. For efficiency, they don’t make a separate sate sauce. They simmer down their soto broth, marinate the meat in that, then glaze it with more as it cooks. The difference was nothing shy of stunning. And, thankfully, mostly easy to replicate back home.

So thanks to soup, sate well worth braving the smoke.