Beef Rendang

This is the CC's second-favorite beef dish with the honors going to steak tartare.

A true masterpiece of Indonesian cooking but it does take some work to make. It requires a ton of time and it's even better the next day. The CC once started it at five in the evening which turned out to be a terrible idea. The hungry hordes waited and we ate at ten at night.

The CC suggests starting at noon for dinner. The dish literally makes itself. All you need is a timer and towards the end a little bit of stirring every 10 minutes. (This is one of those places where a large non-stick flat pan works great!)

Rendang is actually a preservation technique not significantly different from the French duck confit or the Philippine adobo. It's as much a mechanism of preserving the meat in the absence of refrigeration as it is a cooking technique.

(There's a reason that the meat is tender but almost dry and coated with a fatty sheen and the list of spices includes garlic, shallots, ginger, galangal, and especially turmeric all of which have strong anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties.)

The recipe is adapted from James Oseland. (He skips a few crucial spices but since these are old-hat to people used to Indian cooking, the CC has restored them.)

Traditionally, made with water buffalo, you really want the leanest cut of beef that you can get — boneless chuck, top round, bottom round, or even shoulder. It's going to be braised in coconut milk and a ton of spices so there will be the plenty of time for the dish to turn meltingly tender.

James Oseland does have one of the great lines of all time:

Rendang has its own lethargic cooking rhythm, so that the more you try to rush it, the longer it seems to take.

This is talking truth to lazy cooks. Just let it do it's own thing, stir it occasionally, indulge in a book or a crossword, and it will make itself.  It has its own meditative rhythm which cannot be rushed.

The accompaniment (shown below) is a classic nasi kuning (= turmeric rice) which is nothing more than rice boiled with fresh turmeric and salt — pandanus leaves if you have them.

(Note that traditional nasi kuning would generally be cooked with coconut milk but if you do that for such a rich dish, the two would clash so you should go with the simpler style.)

While the recipe is complexly spiced, it's emphatically not "spicy". It has a layered complexity not pure heat.

You will need a side salad and while the CC went with greens and tomatoes (which is a tad French); you'll be equally well served with the classic — slices of cucumbers, salt, and whole chillies.

 
Ingredients

Flavoring Paste

1 whole nutmeg (cracked)
5 cloves
2 cardamoms
1/4 tsp cumin

5 candlenuts (read notes)

1 largish piece of turmeric (or 2 small ones)
2" ginger
2" galangal
3 stalks lemongrass (sliced diagonally very thin)

5-7 fresh red chilis (more if you like it spicy)

3 cloves garlic

6 shallots (coarsely chopped)

dash of palm sugar (substitute by brown sugar)

Main

2 lbs boneless beef chuck (or bottom round) - cubed in 2" pieces
2 1/2 cups coconut milk

1/2 cup asam keping water
1/2 cup roasted dried coconut

3 thick stalks lemongrass (tied into a knot)
1 piece cinnamon stick
7 whole kaffir lime leaves
5 whole daun salan leaves (read notes)
salt

To Serve

1 tbsp kaffir lime leaves (very finely shredded)

Note 1: You will need a mortar and pestle. No, the food processor will not work. Deal with it! The CC knows that people claim it does including Oseland but it gets the textures all wrong. Oddly, the shallots are not soft enough to just dice finely. You need to pound them.

Note 2: Add kosher salt to the mixture while you are pounding soft ingredients. It makes it far easier to control the texture. You won't need to add salt to the final product.

Note 3: Candle nuts are hard to find outside of specialty stores. While most recipes call for macadamia, the CC finds that hazelnuts actually provide the right kind of fat content and taste. You will need 10 hazelnuts since candle nuts are larger.

Note 4: You're bluntly going to have trouble finding asam keping (= "garcinia atroviridis".) Your best choice is to use kudampuli from Southern Indian cooking (= "garcinia cambogia"  or "garcinia gummi-gutta".) If you are totally stuck, use the North Indian kokum (= "garcinia indica") or even in the worst case, plain ol' tamarind. (This makes less difference than you think. It's primary job is the both tenderize the meat and make it less "meaty" while adding a subtle sour flavor.)

Note 5: The remaining fresh spices are easily available at your local Thai store. They're so popular now that the CC found all of them this weekend at his local farmers' market. The dried spices are Indian classics. You should be able to find them in any supermarket or even cheaper in the Indian markets. Use whole ones freshly ground not pre-ground ones!

Note 6: The leaves known as daun salan are actually dried leaves of the cassia tree. Not cinnamon but cassia. They are called tējapattā in Hindi (= तेजपत्ता, literally: "cinnamon leaves") and you find them in Indian stores labeled as "bay leaves" which is complete nonsense since they taste nothing like traditional bay laurel. (If you don't have them, your best bet is a smattering of cinnamon or cassia although the dried leaves are stronger in flavor so amp it up a notch or two.)

Note 7: The two absolute non-negotiables are lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves both of which add very strong citrus notes. In fact, as you read in the recipe below, you need more kaffir lime leaves finely slivered to add to the beef as you serve it (easily seen in the picture above.)

Note 8: Nutmeg is also crucial. Enjoy your happy vivid dreams!

Recipe

To make the asam keping water, just add the dried ingredient to some water and boil it for a few minutes. This is one of the places the microwave works great. (If using tamarind, just cover it with boiling water. When it cools down, squish it with your hands and pass through a sieve. Discard the solids.)

Take all the ingredients for the flavoring paste and pound them using a mortar and pestle. First do all the spices and the hard ingredients then all the soft ingredients. (They are listed in the order that you should do them above.)

Don't worry if your mortar gets full. Just empty it into a bowl and mix afterwards.

This pounding will take the better part of 20-30 minutes so patience is required.

(It's harder to pound soft ingredients rather than hard ones since they just squish and slide around rather than get pounded into a paste. Very counter-intuitive but important to know.)

Combine the paste, all the other ingredients including the beef, coconut milk, leaves and spices into a large pan. Stir gently to mix them all. Bring the mixture to a boil and immediately turn the heat down to medium-low.

Let it bubble away stirring every 20 minutes so that the paste and coconut milk do not stick to the bottom and burn.

James Oseland describes the rest vividly:

The meat, coconut milk, and flavoring paste will now go on a fascinating journey. At first, the broth will be thin and gorgeously bright orange^†. As it cooks, the coconut milk will reduce, its fats (as well as the fat the meat renders) separating from the solids. It will be become progressively thicker and darker eventually turning brown.

Keep stirring until the meat becomes rather glossy with a very thick sauce. This will take the better part of anywhere between 3 to 4 hours^‡. The meat should be tender enough to easily poke with a fork. (You may need to add some water from time to time.)

When all the liquid has evaporated, reduce the heat to low and allow the beef to brown in the fat. Stir every 5 minutes because it has a tendency to stick.

The beef should be coffee-colored and barely moist with a glossy sheen.

(As a general rule, there should not be any fat left in the pan but if there is skim it with a spoon and store for later use. It's great for a classic Indonesian dish made with new potatoes!)

Discard the whole lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, daun salan leaves, and cinnamon.

Allow the beef to rest at least 30 minutes before serving. More if you can swing it. It's best served at room temperature (or slightly warm rather than hot) topped with the finely slivered kaffir lime leaves.

---

† from the turmeric.

‡ This may very well be an underestimate. Five hours is not out of the question if the cut of the meat is extremely lean.

Green Peppercorn Pickles

The CC is not the sentimental type and he's certainly not the rhapsodising type but if there ever were something to send him into a Proustian "madeleine" moment, it would be these pickles.

What are they?

Fresh green peppercorns that have been pickled with just salt and lime.

A good friend of the CC's used to eat them with yogurt-rice. He couldn't cook if his life depended on it (still can't!) so these were "a lifeline for kitchen failures and the lovelorn". Bit of a harsh judgment on the CC's part.

Back to the peppercorns.

Only going to work with fresh peppercorns which are hard to find. Ideally, you would use just salt but you need lime to get the pH of the liquid down to the right level. The lime does not participate in the final product as a taste since the canning process neutralizes it.

If you're going to make truly great steak au poivre or the classic Thai green fish curry with green peppercorns (พริกไทยอ่อน), these be the peppercorns that you want to use. In a wondrous world, you'd have fresh peppercorns all year around but it's not a wondrous world. We can just make it a little more wondrous with food technology.

Ingredients

(based on your canning jar size)

500 grams green peppercorns
8 tbsp sea salt
4 limes (juiced and passed through a sieve)

water

Note: Canning jars come with a sealant. The sealant is activated when inverted in boiling water.

Recipe

Wash the peppercorns really carefully. Set aside.

Bring water to a boil. Dump the bottle inside and fish it out. You are just sterilizing the bottle. In this bottle, drop the peppercorns, the salt and the lime juice. Add enough cold fresh water to top off the jar.

Add the sealing mechanism and seal carefully. Gently put the bottle upside-down in the boiling water. Bring to a boil and let it boil for about 5-6 minutes.

Fish it out and let it sit.

Takes about 2-3 weeks to pickle. Once you open the bottle, you must keep it in the fridge. Use a clean fork/spoon to fish out the pickles. Add more salt and water to cover them when you do so.

Black Chickpea Sundal

This is a street food snack from South India that's easy to prepare and quite healthy.

You can prepare it with a variety of lentils and legumes. The version swapping out the black chickpeas for fresh peanuts is particularly tasty.

The black chickpeas are the small chickpeas that you find in India. They are much smaller than the regular chickpeas and dark black in color. They also have a higher protein content.

Experienced readers will note that the recipe is not substantially different from that of sukke except for the addition of the urad dal which when fried adds a nutty taste and crispy textural note.

Also, since the CC belongs to the "anal-retentive" category of humans, you really want shredded coconut not grated coconut here for the textural interest. Yes, it makes a massive difference. It's available frozen. Just make sure you thaw it before you make it.

Ingredients

1 cup black chickpeas

8-10 curry leaves
1 tbsp. mustard seeds
1 tbsp. urad dal
3-4 dried red chillies
1/2 cup shredded coconut
pinch of asafetida

coconut oil
salt

Recipe

First cook the chickpeas. Soak them overnight and cook for about 20 minutes until they are tender enough to eat. Drain and set aside.

Heat the coconut oil in a wok. When it heats up add the mustard seeds and wait for them to pop. Add the urad dal, red chillies and asafetida till the dal turns golden in color. Add the curry leaves. Be careful. They will tend to splatter.

Add the chickpeas, coconut and salt to taste and combine thoroughly. Sautée for 4-5 minutes and serve.

This snack is great either luke-warm or at room temperature.

Bilimbi

They are called bilimbi in India or kamias in the Philippines. In fact, they are almost unheard of outside the tropical countries. They are used as a souring agent because of their tart taste.

They are just awesome either cooked or eaten raw with salt and spice. (Link.)

Mixed Vegetable Coconut Curry

Naah, it's not quite aviyal (no yogurt) but the CC likes this better.

(Recipe to follow - how else to get you to read, huh?)

Idlis

After pissing around forever, the CC has finally managed to make the idlis of his dreams.

Fluffy, fluffy, fluffy, fluffy, fluffy deliciousness.

Here are the practical problems in a nutshell:

The CC lives in a colder climate. The CC lives in a climate where there is serious temperature variation between day and night. The CC lives in a drier climate.

All of these are real problems that need to be solved. Many of these do not apply to the Californicators or those in God's Waiting Room, the Floridians. Congratulations on your luck!

Ingredients

1 tbsp fenugreek seeds (soaked)
urad (soaked)
idli rava (read below)

patience (and lots of it!)

Recipe

Soak the fenugreek seeds and the urad for 6-8 hours.

Grind the crap out of the stuff to produce an extremely smooth paste with as little of the soaked water as possible.

Now, add 2.5 portions of the idli rava by volume. Add some water to make a thickish paste.

Now, comes the patience part. You need to let the stuff ferment in a warm-ish place at a relatively stable temperature. What only takes overnight in India can easily take four days out in the US. An oven with a pilot light works wonders.

Some auxiliary observations:

Do not add salt up front. This prevents the sourdough from forming.

Do not use chlorinated water.

If the batter seems dried out, add water and stir periodically.

The thing will ferment eventually, and you will get fluffy soft idlis.

Patience, young Jedis!

Dinner, Brunch and Dinner

Sour panchratna daal
♥
Paneer mutter
♥
Sukke (with long beans)
♥
Parathas (not shown)
Coconut chutney
♥
Sambaar
♥
Idli
Paneer mutter
♥
Saffron pulao

A Tale of Two Chutneys

Let's get down and dirty about two Indian chutneys; one from the North and the other from the South.

Everyone gets to compare and contrast. This is more about you than India.

Are you lazy or involved? Are you complex or simple?

Ideally, they'd be ground with with a mortar and pestle similar to the Mexican molcajete, but who is the CC kidding? If he starts giving instructions for mortar and pestle, he'll lose what limited audience he has already.

Anyway, both the chutneys rock; and they are delightfully spreadable like a ..., well, you folks get the metaphor, right?

We do them in reverse order of difficulty.

South Indian Coconut Chutney

Ingredients

2 tbsp chana daal
1 cup cilantro leaves
1" ginger (coarsely diced)
5-6 Thai green chillies (substitute with 2 serranos)
1 cup coconut flakes (frozen is not just fine, it's brilliant!)

1 tbsp mustard
2 tbsp urad daal
1/2 tsp asafoetida
8-10 curry leaves

salt
lime juice (to taste)

Recipe

Roast the chana till it is dark golden. It's already yellow so there's a fine line between roasting and burning.

Blend the chana, cilantro, coconut, ginger, and green chillies with some salt and lime juice. Try and blend it with the least amount of water so that you can control it later.

Heat some oil in a pan. Toss in the mustard seeds until they splutter and burst. Toss in the asafoetida, the urad, and the curry leaves.

Toss in this mixture inside the blended mixture.

Yeah, this is hard. You don't want to heat up the blended mixture. There are instruments and techniques but this is not something that can easily be described.

You can always just add a tiny amount of water to the fried mixture, wait for it to cool, and then mix the two.

Just do your best. This is hard to screw up.

North Indian Chutney

4 cups cilantro leaves
1 cup peanuts (shelled, roasted)
5-6 Thai green chillies (substitute with 2 serranos.)
salt
lime juice.

Recipe

There's even a version that skips the peanuts but the CC likes them 'cause they add some zing.

Toss the stuff in a blender. Blend till smooth-ish.

Easy peasy.

Words of Wisdom

When making sourdough (or sourdough brethren like idli, etc.), you need to put them in large bowls with lots of space so that the stuff doesn't overflow and make a huge mess, and you start your day by cleaning a mess.

Learn, wise people, from the foolishness of the CC!

Upma

The CC has been craving this but he had run out of ingredients. To add insult to injury, a friend mentioned via chat that she was making it. The CC could've killed her for bringing it up on a day where heavy downpours coincided with unachievable cravings.

So an quick trip to the store the next day, he set out to make it.

The idea is simple. Take finely ground wheat (cream of wheat, farina, rava), and cook it with spices till it's light and fluffy. The similarity to both couscous (tiny cooked pasta), grits (tiny bits of corn), and innumerous similar dishes worldwide should be noted.

Ingredients

1 cup rava (cream of wheat)
1 small onion (finely diced)
2-3 green chillies (finely chopped)
1/2 cup broken cashewnuts
assorted finely diced vegetables (carrots, peas)

1 tbsp mustard seeds
1 tbsp urad daal
asafoetida
8-10 curry leaves

1-2 tbsp lime juice

Recipe


Fry some mustard seeds at medium heat, add the urad daal and the asafoetida, followed by the curry leaves. Apologies for the bad quality of this picture but the CC had to get to the next step before the daal burnt.

Add the onions, green chillies, and let it fry for a while.

Add the cashews and let them fry.

Now, we need to roast the rava at medium to medium high heat. This step cannot be hurried. It is the source of the deliciousness thanks to Master Maillard. If you don't do this, or try to speed it up, you will end up with boiled wheat (which tastes about as good as it sounds.)

The mixture needs to be stirred continuously until it turns a pale brown. Do not let it burn.

The vegetables should go in towards the tail end.

This is the hardest step to describe. There are two ways to do this. The "Indian" way, or the CC's way.

The Indian way involves adding the roasted rava to water. This requires you to correctly gauge the amount of water and lime ahead of time, and mess around with splashage. The CC's way is slower but will get you flawless mess-free results that are indistinguishable from the original.

Add water a few tablespoons at a time using a tablespoon. Do not "pour". Stir, and break up the lumps. The idea is to let them steam in the tiny amount of water. Keep repeating this quite slowly until it becomes hard to break up the lumps at which point stop adding water. Towards the end, you should add the lime juice if you like. Yes, the CC is aware that these instructions sound like "get off two stops before the last one" but what can he do?

Take the pot off the heat at the end. Even the modest heat coming off a gas stove will destroy it. After all this work, you don't want to blow it in the last step without even realizing it.

Do this right and you will end up with a light and fluffy delight.

Do this wrong and you will end up with something that looks like fratboy upchuck after an all night kegger.

The CC knows he won't earn any points for subtlety with that simile but readers "in the know" will give him high marks for dead-on accuracy.

Fluffy delicious upma

Curry Leaves

Unique aroma when fried, and absolutely critical for South Indian cooking. Probably the only ingredient that the CC craves on a regular basis but it is not that easy to obtain (involves making a long trip.)

Just for the record, the dried stuff sucks. Better than nothing but still not the real deal. The CC has some but is severely underwhelmed.

Perhaps the CC should just grow his own, huh?

Dips, Raitas, and other assorted goodies

Virtually every country that consumes milk has some variations on this theme.

The CC had a lot of leftover yogurt (don't ask!), and some assorted stuff (cucumbers, carrots, mint, curry leaves) in his refrigerator. His thoughts turned to how to consume most of it efficiently, but also leave it in a form that could be easily stored for later consumption.

Inspiration struck, and out came the thought of making a bunch of yogurt-based foods.

There are more recipes here than humans. Writing a book on these would be the ultimate waste of time. Who'd read all these basic variations on the same theme?

Tzatziki

Ingredients

1 english cucumber (grated)
2 cloves garlic (minced fine)
mint (chopped into ribbons)
strained yogurt
salt and pepper

Recipe

Mix everything, and let it sit for an hour.

South-Indian Carrot Raita

Ingredients

carrots (grated)
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tbsp urad
5-7 curry leaves
strained yogurt
salt

Recipe

Heat a tiny amount of oil in a pan. Toss in the mustard seeds. When they splutter, toss in the urad. When they turn light brown, toss in the curry leaves. Add the carrots and sautee for about a minute. Let it cool.

Mix everything together, and let it sit for at least an hour.

Crab Masala

This recipe has a relatively large number of ingredients, and is a bit of work, but if the CC can cook it on a weekday night with an injured thumb then so can you. This is truly lip-smackingly good.

Put on some music, and start chopping!

(This would also work with prawns, or mussels.)

Ingredients

crab meat (cleaned)
1 large onion (diced finely)
1 large potato (diced coarsely)
4 small tomatoes (cut into quarter-rounds)
8 cloves garlic (ground into a paste)
1 inch ginger (ground into a paste)
5 Thai green chillies (slitted vertically)
1 tbsp cumin seeds
4 tbsp coriander powder (roasted and ground)
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
1 tsp Indian red chilli powder
1/2 cup fresh grated coconut (frozen is fine)
15-20 fresh curry leaves
3 tbsp tamarind paste (or a little more to taste)
1/4 cup cilantro leaves (chopped finely)
salt to taste

Recipe

Fry the onions till they are golden. Add the ginger-garlic paste, green chillies, black pepper, cumin, coriander, red chilli powder, turmeric, curry leaves, and salt; fry for a minute or so.

Add the diced potatoes, and fry for 2-3 minutes, followed by the tomatoes. Cover, and let simmer till the potatoes are slightly tender. Add the crab meat, and cook for 8 minutes or so. Add the tamarind paste, and the grated coconut, and cook uncovered for a minute or so.

Toss in the chopped cilantro right before serving.

Buttermilk (South-Indian style)

Well, the CC has been working a lot from home, and he's been making this in large quantities to have some with lunch, etc.

It's amazingly simple.

Buttermilk in India doesn't refer to the same thing as here. It's basically 1 part yogurt blended with 2/3-1 part water (depends on whether you like it thick or watery.)

You need to good "Greek-style" yogurt for this. Most of the yogurt in this country sucks, and if the CC may say so in the pop-vernacular, "it sucks ass!"

The difference in this recipe is the addition of mustard seeds, and curry leaves.

Recipe

Fry some mustard seeds, add the curry leaves and fry for a bit. Toss it in with the yogurt, and water in the blender, and blend it.

It'll last as long as yogurt lasts so you can make quite a bit of it, and store it.

"Lemon" Rice

The "lemon" in the recipe actually refers to "lime" as the CC has discussed in the Hindenburg of culinary disasters!.

This is a basic everyday kinda recipe from the South of India, and like basic everyday kinda recipes, you have to make it just so, otherwise you'll be left wondering what the fuss was all about.

Made right, this is the ultimate comfort food.

Theoretically speaking, this is no different from a risotto except with different flavoring, and the rice is slightly firmer, and less "wet".

The CC will grant that the ingredients "seem" a bit a exotic. They're not exotic in India (duh!) nor are they particularly exotic in any city that the CC has lived in or visited (which means both coasts, and Chicago.)

In fact, minus one ingredient, they are downright pedestrian.

This must be served with yogurt. Good yogurt, the Greek kind, not the pasteurized garbage that passes for food in this country.

Guess what the CC is eating for dinner tonight!

Ingredients

6-8 curry leaves (this is the exotic one! try dried if you can't get fresh)
1 tbsp mustard seeds
2 tbsp "urad" daal (lentils, easy to get at your local Indian store.)
1 medium red onion, diced (optional)
3-5 serranos (cut into very fine rounds)
1/4 cup peanuts
1 cup basmati rice (no other will do!)
1/4 tsp turmeric
juice of 4 limes
salt

Recipe

Fry some oil, and add the mustard. Cover, and wait till the mustard "pops". Add the urad, fry for a bit, add the onion, fry for a bit (till pale), add the serranos, fry for a bit, add the curry leaves, fry for a bit, add the peanuts, fry for a bit, add the rice, fry till the rice is coated with the oil.

Add the turmeric and salt, and roughly 1.5 cups of water. Turn to a low simmer, and let it cook uncovered till the rice is nearly cooked. Add the lime juice towards the end.

Serve hot with yogurt!