Many moons ago when I was living in Malaysia, I spent much of my time feasting on what is often considered to be the king of all curries: the rendang! I made sure I left with the recipe courtesy of one of the teachers that I was working with (her mum) and can knock one up pretty easily these days as long as I have access to the ingredients. Here are some of them below (not the bread) with a few nice slabs of beef shin for the slow cooking:
So, the first step is the paste, which took me about 15 minutes to get as fine as i could, save for a few galangal pubes, and I then started the cooking process in the hot oil with cardamom, cloves and star anise.
To be honest, once you've fucked about getting all the stuff, made the paste and fried it, you're on easy street really and it's just a waiting game once the beef, tamarind and coconut milk have gone in.
Although you still need to add the kerisik (the toasted coconut that gives it a slightly nutty taste) and the palm sugar, so I did this once it had started cooking and began reducing.
How the fuck do you get the golden brown off the rock though?
Well, you get the spoon out, of course!
Anyway, about 3 and 1/2 hours later, here we are:
Perfectly good to eat now, and you would do if it was your standard Indian curry with plenty of sauce, but the joy of rendang is that it's a "dry" curry, so over the next couple of days, (after putting it into batches for future eating from the freezer), we further reduced what was left in the pan. Personally, I always eat anything slow cooked with beef or lamb a couple of days later anyway as the flavours are just so much more intense than when you eat it immediately.
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Eventually, the sauce is almost black and the sugars and spices have melted into and surrounded the meat.
The flavour is ridiculous and it's definitely up there with some of the best curries around, but, having eaten the odd 1 or 13,000 in my lifetime, I'd still go for the Indian sub-continent if push came to shove for the best.
It is really good though and if you fancy having a dabble yourself, this recipe is pretty similar to the one I was given:
Beef Rendang (The BEST Recipe!) - Rasa Malaysia