In Good Taste: Celebrity chefs
Beef rendang
It’s funny, but we all have our favourites, and they vary considerably depending on whether we want to learn how to cook, be entertained, or just admire another beautiful person in another beautiful kitchen.
I like chefs who still have their feet firmly planted on the kitchen floor—their own kitchen floor, that is. Not these guys (yep, sorry guys, but it’s usually you) whose heads are so far up their own extractor fans that you wouldn’t know where all that hot air had come from.
Rick Stein is my favourite celebrity chef. His calm manner and the genuine delight he finds in food/people/places is infectious and makes you want to head straight to the kitchen with a basket of exotic ingredients fresh from the market. He is OK about making mistakes, and happy to tell you about them. It’s this honesty that makes us feel that we too can attempt any recipe, and that it’s also OK if we go a little wrong. He doesn’t rely on a beautiful body or a flurry of swear words to get our attention, and is happy to stand back and let the food speak for itself. In his books, each recipe comes with a small anecdote, a palate-teasing story, which takes us there, gets us in the mood. This is clever, for as soon as we know a little history on a subject, or interest is piqued and some sense of personal ownership ensues, away we go.
Rick’s recipe for beef rendang is in his latest book, Far Eastern Odyssey, from the television series now showing, and is a Malaysian version of this dish, which varies from region to region. Here I have used a recipe from an earlier book called Food Heroes, as the ingredients are easier to source. It’s always at this time of the year that the taste buds enjoy a bit of a wake-up call, and this recipe really does the trick. Make the rendang spice paste the day before if you like and then the whole dish can be assembled quite easily. Serve the rendang with steamed jasmine rice and cucumber sambal. The beef rendang will taste even better the next day.
Spice paste
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon of cumin seeds
2.5cm stick of cinnamon
4 cloves
3 dried chillies, or to taste
2.5cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled
6 cloves of garlic
1 stick of lemongrass, outer layers removed and reserved and the rest roughly chopped
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon of turmeric
1 tablespoon of chopped galangal (optional)
Put the seeds, cinnamon, cloves and chilli in a mortar and grind with the pestle to a fine powder. Now place the ginger, garlic, lemongrass, onion, turmeric and galangal into a food processor along with the ground spices and 2 tablespoons of water and blend to a smooth paste.
Beef rendang
1.5kg blade or chuck steak, cut into 2cm cubes.
600ml of coconut cream (this is 1½ tins, so save the rest for the cucumber sambal).
1 tablespoon of brown sugar
A walnut-sized piece of tamarind pulp, soaked in 85ml warm water until soft and squishy, and pushed through a sieve. Discard the fibre, which will not go through the sieve, and set aside the remaining liquid.
3 kaffir lime leaves if you have them
1 teaspoon of salt
In a heavy-based pan heat the spice paste with the reserved lemongrass stalks, the beef, tamarind water, coconut cream, sugar, lime leaves, and salt. Cook for three hours, stirring now and again. Stir often towards the end of the cooking time to ensure the concentrated sauce doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Eventually the oil from the coconut cream will start to separate from the sauce, but continue to cook for a minute or two longer to allow the meat to fry lightly in the oil. Remove and discard the lemongrass and check for seasoning.
While the rendang is cooking, make the cucumber sambal.
One cucumber peeled and cut in half. Scoop out the seeds and chop into thin, moon-shaped slices. Place into a colander and sprinkle with half a teaspoon of salt. Leave for 15 minutes, then rinse with cold water and dry in a tea towel. Mix together with the following ingredients:
3 tablespoons of coconut cream
1 red chilli, halved, seeded and thinly sliced
1 small red onion
2 tablespoons of lime juice.
It’s hard to resist making this beef rendang often. It’s described beautifully by Rick: “…a sweet and intensely spicy flavour (not necessarily hot), it is unique in that the liquid ingredient, coconut cream, is cooked down to such an extent that it disappears with the spices into a pleasing sticky, brown coating for the beef.”
Fiona Feasey
