Beef Rendang

Where has Malaysian food been all my life? Yes, OK, in Malaysia. But for the average UK foodie it has not only been missing from our lives – most of us didn’t even know it was missing.

Fortunately that’s all changing as Malaysian food’s profile is on the rise: restaurants like London’s Rasa Sayang (a personal favourite) are popping up and no longer have to pretend to be Chinese to avoid scaring us ignorant locals.

And Britain’s very own Rick Stein accepted a handful of Malaysian Ringgit to promote the country’s food on TV and at the annual Taste of London festival last year.

I’ve only sampled a handful of the nation's dishes and still have lots to learn – especially about the mysterious and varied fishy, spicy relishes or sambals. But here’s my take on one of the best known Malaysian standards: Beef Rendang. The slow cooked stew of coconut, spices and fork tender beef.

I’ve no doubt there are a hundred variations on the recipe – and some are probably more authentic than others. All I can say is that this one works, is pretty easy, and tastes just like the best Rendang I’ve had in Malaysian restaurants.

SPICE PASTE:
5 cloves of garlic
2 inches ginger (or half ginger / galangal if you can get it)
3 sticks of lemongrass (white bits only)
6 shallots
10 dried chillies, deseeded, soaked in water (large medium hot ones, not the tiny nuclear bomb type)

WHOLE SPICES:
3 cloves
4 star anise
3 cardamom pods
1 cinnamon stick

THE REST:
750g good quality stewing beef, bite sized chunks
Cooking oil
1 stick lemongrass, bashed
1 can coconut milk
2 teaspoons tamarind paste (buy in jar, or buy pulp, soak & sieve)
5 tablespoons desiccated coconut
1 tablespoon palm sugar / other sugar
Salt / fish sauce to season
Crispy shallots to garnish (optional)*




1 Make the spice paste.
(My tip: use a hand-held stick blender and a tall beaker / sturdy measuring jug. Add a splash of oil to bring the mixture together if necessary. This will give you a homogenous smooth paste, unlike a countertop blender, which in my experience only ever makes a grainy, gritty mush.
Or if you’re feeling particularly energetic a large pestle and mortar will always deliver the best results, though it does take forever and annoys the neighbours.)

2 Toast the dried coconut in a dry pan until nutty and brown and remove.

3 Heat some oil until medium hot, then fry off the spice paste and dry spices for 1 -2 minutes.

4 Add the meat and stir to coat for a minute.

5 Add coconut milk, toasted coconut, tamarind, bashed lemongrass and sugar. Give it a good stir, then lower the heat to a simmer.

6 Make sure the meat is covered at this stage, if not add a splash of water. Right now it will look more like a Thai red curry than Beef Rendang, but this is when the magic happens. You need to simmer the stew uncovered on a low heat for 1.5 – 2 hours, stirring occasionally, until the meat is tender. Rendang is meant to be fairly dry, and the mixture will reduce throughout until the oil starts to split out from the sauce.

7 Just make sure it doesn’t get too dry too soon. You don’t want it to burn – so add a splash of water if you think it might start to catch on the bottom before the meat is done. By the end you’ve got a dark brown, oily, sticky work of art.

8 Season with salt / fish sauce to taste and adjust sweetness if necessary. Serve with rice and garnish with crispy shallots.



*(Crispy shallot recipe: if you’re in the mood make these in advance / whilst the rending is still cooking. What you want is crispy, browned, dry shallots without any bitterness or black charring. And I’ve got a trick that’s fool proof:

Slice up some shallots – might as well make a decent batch while you’re at it.
Put the shallots in plenty of COLD oil to cover. This is the crucial part.
Gradually heat up the oil to a low deep-frying temperature. Take your time here for the best results.
As it comes up to temperature it will drive out all the moisture from the shallots. When you’ve got a golden brown colour remove from heat and drain on kitchen paper.

These shallots will keep in an airtight container or ziplock bag for a couple of weeks in the fridge.
Plus you now have some golden shallot-flavoured oil to add flavour to other Asian dishes)

The Perfect Hamburger

The perfect burger. I’m not the first person to observe that it’s something you cannot find for love nor money in this country. Even in London, which offers more formed–meat-patty-in-bun eating opportunities than most British cities. Let’s rule out the big fast food chains for a start: the golden arches and the creepy mask-wearing King are obviously popular around the World, but for a real burger connoisseur they’re only ever a desperate last resort when there’s no other option or you’re too drunk to care. Again.

Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Hamburger Union and Byron are slightly better, with the latter being the best of the bunch. Though I’ve got to say that with Byron Burgers’ rapid expansion throughout London I’ve had mixed experiences at different venues. I also think there’s something fundamentally wrong with paying close to a tenner for a cheeseburger – which by definition should be a lowbrow, low cost food.

The consensus seems to be that the birthplace of the hamburger is the German city of Hamburg where to this day one of the local delicacies is the Frikadelle: a flattened meatball with lots of onion, egg and filler. I’ve eaten the occasional Frikadelle, having spent some time in Germany, and it’s a bit of an acquired taste if you ask me.

But apart from the name and the vague resemblance to Hamburg’s favourite chopped meat snack I don’t think anyone would deny that the hamburger we know today is really an American invention. There are various contradictory claims about who first popularised the burger but most accounts seem to date back to the turn of the twentieth century. And here we are more than a hundred years later, still enjoying a grilled meat patty on a bun, from its most basic version to the simultaneously terrifying and intriguing sounding McAloo Tikki with Cheese.

So can you get a decent hamburger in America? Yes you can. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of terrible versions to be had in the US, but their highs are so much higher than our highs, so to speak. The best American burgers seem to be simpler, purer; letting the core ingredients speak for themselves and focussing on the real star of the show: the salty, crusty, juicy meat.

Take the independently owned In N Out Burger chain, for example. The mere mention is enough to make a hamburger aficionado stare wistfully into the distance, remembering burgers loved and lost / eaten. In N Out has a cult following. Mainly because of the quality of the food, but no doubt partially due to the Secret Menu – all manner of unusual combinations of ingredients that aren’t advertised in store. In fact the secret menu isn’t remotely secret because every regular customer knows their Animal Style from their 4 by 4s, and most of the variations are even listed on the company’s website.

(In case you’re wondering: Animal Style is with grilled onions, extra pickles and ‘spread’ (sauce), and mustard cooked into the patties. 4 by 4 means four patties and four slices of cheese.)


You may hear the singing of a heavenly choir whilst looking at this photo of a Double Double. That's normal.

The problem with In N Out is that they only exist on the Western side of America - California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. In fact one of the company policies is that they will only open a restaurant within one day’s drive of their meat processing plant in Baldwin Park, California. So I’ve got no hope of getting a Double Double anywhere near the office at lunchtime. Being more than five and a half thousand miles away, and all.

Only one thing for it: I’ll have to make my own. I’m not going for an In N Out clone, just a perfectly made, delicious hamburger.

My inspiration was Kenji Alt-Lopez, currently my absolute favourite food writer on the internet. In his Food Lab column on Serious Eats Kenji goes to fabulously absurd lengths to understand the science and cooking technique behind various foods. Want to know how to make the perfect home-made French fries? Kenji is your man. He cooked dozens of batches in his New York apartment, chopping, frying and eating kilos of potatoes until he’d cracked it.

In a recent column Kenji had several In N Out Burgers shipped overnight from the West coast in order to carry out a CSI style forensic investigation and make his own version. If you like food and science this is the site for you.

My recipe for the perfect hamburger is in the next post below.

My perfect hamburger recipe

You can’t make a burger without meat so I headed to Borough market to buy some cuts of beef that I though would give me a good blend of flavour and texture. It’s always tricky trying to apply knowledge from American burger recipes when shopping here because we have different cuts of meat. But the principle remains the same: you need plenty of fat to lubricate the meat during cooking and some flavourful muscle to make the whole thing taste good. The good news is that you get all these attributes from the cheaper, lesser used cuts, so even if you go for high end beef it’s not going to be outrageously expensive.

In the end I bought some feather steak for bulk, a piece of onglet for its gamey flavour and one shortrib with plenty of fat. The perfect combination? I’m not sure, but I liked the look of the pieces of meat and thought they would work well together. And even at extravagantly-priced Borough market the whole lot cost me less than ten pounds.

You could also just buy all chuck steak, which would do a perfectly respectable job, and might be easier to find.



Back at home I dusted off the old meat grinder, which I bought a few years ago when I was experimenting with making sausages. If grinding meat sounds like your idea of fun I would really recommend buying one. They only cost around £35 and will last a lifetime. The quality of minced meat you get out of it is infinitely superior to anything you can buy. I got mine here.



Having said that you can also make these burgers by pulsing the meat in a food processor. But no matter which method you use one thing is absolutely crucial: you MUST chill the meat.

First cut it up into chunks, lay it out onto a baking sheet and put it in the freezer for about 30 minutes. This allows the meat to firm up and means when you come to grind or blend it, it cuts cleanly across the muscle fibres, rather than squashing and smearing them into a raw beef pate. You’ll end up with a much better texture and a juicier finished product. It’s also a good idea to chill any bowls you’ll be using too. And if you’re using a metal meat grinder stick that in the freezer before you use it.

If you’re making burger to eat straight away getting this nice clean cutting and grinding action is the main advantage to semi-freezing the meat. But if you’re making burgers to cook at a later stage (or indeed making sausages) it’s also essential from a food safety point of view. Bacteria breed on the surface of meat, not on the inside. When you grind meat into mince you’re massively increasing the surface area, and effectively turning the whole thing into a potential bacteria All You Can Eat Buffet. But if you keep the meat cold microbial growth is significantly inhibited.

This is nothing to be scared of, so don’t let it put you off, especially for these burgers if you’re cooking them straight away. You just need to keep your equipment clean and your meat cold. That’s all there is to it. Keeping your equipment clean and your meat cold is a useful motto which can be applied to all sorts of life situations, by the way.



I ground the trimmed, fatty short rib once, mixed it in with the other cubes of meat and ground the whole lot again. I then split the mince into quarter pounder sized piles and formed them into burger shapes very gently. The idea is to handle the meat as as little as possible to maintain the loosely packed meaty grain. If you work it too hard the meat fibres start to get sticky and cling to each other, giving you a completely different, more processed texture, like a sausage.



You’ll also notice that there are absolutely no flavourings in this meat. This is another big difference between a high end US burger and the kind of thing you’d get served in a restaurant or a gastropub here. No onions, cumin, herbs, coriander, paprika, garlic, truffle oil, essence of Tibetan wood fungus… nothing.

I too was lost and have now seen the light. I used to try to build up flavour with all sorts of additional aromatics and seasonings before realising that less is more. If you’ve got great beef, then let it taste of beef.

In fact, you may have spotted there isn’t even any salt in the burger. This is for a different reason altogether. And again I have to raise my burger bun in salute to Mr Kenji Alt-Lopez, who carried out a range of experiments on his very subject (an interesting read with photographic evidence).

Adding salt at the grinding or forming stage fundamentally changes the texture of the hamburger. Instead of loose granular pieces of beef you end up with a homogenous sausage-like mass.

Only once you’re ready to cook should you season the burgers with salt and pepper. You’ll need to be quite generous because you’re seasoning the whole burger from the outside. If you’re not cooking them straight away, don’t season them and put them in the fridge. Because you’re dealing with minced meat you probably don’t want to refrigerate the burgers for more than a day or two, but they freeze beautifully.

The burgers are quite loosely packed so they cook best in a hot frying pan or on a hotplate with a little oil. Cook them for 2 to 3 minutes on one side, without poking or moving them about to allow a nice crust to form, then flip them over to finish cooking on the other side and rest.

Getting a decent burger bun is a perennial problem here, one that I haven’t solved yet. But whatever you use give it a good toasting so it can cope with the hot juices flowing out of the burger without disintegrating.

Following Kenji’s In N Out autopsy recipe I served my cheeseburger with a Thousand Island style spread made with Ketchup, pickles and yoghurt (mayo in the original, but alas I’m cursed by my egg allergy).

I also made some fabulously sweet caramelised onions: 3 large onions chopped and sweated in a little butter over a VERY low heat. Whenever they eventually started to catch I added some water and let them carry on reducing. They cooked for about 3 hours, though it wasn’t very labour intensive.



Making your own burgers by grinding meat may seem like a lot of work, but it’s definitely worth the trouble because the end result is infinitely superior to any other method. Have a go yourself and let me know how you got on.

Taste of London

Some pictures from Taste of London 2010 in Regents Park, taken on a phonecam, so a bit rough n ready:

Chicken Satay with the usual trimmings from Paddington Restaurant Tukdin. Also saw a cooking demonstration from their head chef, who seems like a very friendly and talented young man:


Next from Gaucho: Argentine Black Angus steak with chimchuri sauce and humitas (an Argentinian kind of tamale): crushed sweetcorn and masa harina flour steamed in a leaf. Steak had a nice flavour, but the steamed sweetcorn number was spectacular.


The best dish so far from Angela Hartnett's York and Albany: Pistachio crusted lamb cutlet with soused tomatoes and a smoked aubergine puree (served in what I can only describe as a 'turd-shaped-cone'). Tasted great though - weirdly intense brown colour in the puree. Not sure how they achieved that.


Daube of Beef a la nicoise from Le Gavroche, with braised olives and a cheesy soft polenta. Beautifully cooked and wholesome, though not necessarily hot weather food. Michel Roux Jr was pressing the flesh at the stall.


The headline chef today was Rick Stein, who was, slightly bizarrely, there to promote Malaysian food (there's also a whole Malaysian section near the entrance). I've always had a soft spot for old Rick, so it was nice to see him up close and watch his cooking demos. He seemed a bit hot and flustered, and the cooking didn't go quite as planned. But he came across as the same easy going guy he is on TV and the audience loved him. Saw him make a grilled fish and a coconut chicken curry.


Some other famous faces - Georgio Locatelli at his stall (didn't eat there)


And Gok Wan (left) paired up Jun Tanaka (right):


Saving the best to last - the two dishes I sampled from modern Japanese restaurant Dinings. The best food I had at the festival last year also came from Dinings, and I've had dinner there in the meantime. First some chilli garlic black cod. Just sensational.


And finally one of the 'signature dishes', a new concept that's been introduced this year. The signatures are a way of charging even more than the already excessive prices at Taste. But in this case the 8 quid cost was (almost) worth it: Seared wagyu sushi two ways. One with a chunk of seared foie gras on top. Not sure what all the minutely portioned seasonings and sauces on the dish were, but it was definitely the standout dish of the day


So, a fun day out, and some amazing food, but there's one overwhelming flavour that lingers in the mouth: the bitter taste of having been thoroughly milked of your hard earned cash. It costs around 22 pounds just to get in the gate, and then every dish is at least 3 to 4 pounds, with the "mains" costing from 5 upwards. Considering these are all just tasting plates it works out pretty expensive.

I don't think you can come here planning to try a few different dishes without spending at least 50 quid. If you're really going for it and having some drinks it will easily be £75 and up. Great as it was I'm not sure it's worth that much money.

The clever thing to do would probably be to cut out the middle man, save half your money and just go and have dinner at Dinings.

Pepperoni and Anchovy Pizzas

Have been experimenting with making my own pizza dough in recent weeks and think I'm getting close to nailing it. This time I left the dough to rise for 10 hours, despite being worried about it over-rising and collapsing into a gooey mess. But it came out great - makes such a difference to the taste. The longer it rises the longer it has to develop deep, bready flavours.

Next time I'll measure the quantities (rather than just busking them by eye) and post the recipe here.

Beer Snack

Here's something I stumbled across randomly on the internet yesterday: a really simple dish I'd never heard of that's actually rather excellent with a drink - fried chickpeas. I'd credit the website, but don't know what it is anymore... I've made up my own recipe inspired by the idea.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan and add finely chopped garlic. Open a can of chickpeas, drain and dry, then toss in heavily seasoned flour. I used paprika, chilli, salt and pepper. Fry the chickpeas until crispy, drain on kitchen paper and serve hot with an ice cold beer. They're surprisingly delicious - crunchy and spicy on the outside, like roasted peanuts; mealy and starchy on the inside, like fluffy chips.

Other flavour ideas could be garlic, parsley and lemon zest or curry powder... whatever takes your fancy.



Two new posts in a day after a month-long hiatus! Please let me know if you read and like / hate this blog, because I'm never sure if I'm just writing for my own amusement. If anyone actually cares what I write I'd have a reason to do it more regularly.

Cheers.

EDIT: Credit where it's due. The site that I got the idea from:
http://www.ecurry.com/blog/starters-snacks/fried-chickpeas-or-ceci-frito/

BBQ Blowout

My sister is getting married in October. In America, which is a little inconvenient for most of her friends and relatives. So we had an engagement party in this country for anyone unable / unwilling to travel all the way to San Francisco. I ended up volunteering to prepare all the food, and with 45 people coming it was by far the largest crowd I've ever cooked for.

A formal sit-down meal for that many people would been completely out of my comfort zone, but a barbecue seemed manageable. I've grilled for around 20 people before, so it wasn't a massive step up. Although charcoal is always my first choice we went with a hired gas BBQ. The large cooking surface and sustained heat made a lot of sense for that many people. The last thing I wanted to do was constantly having to re-stoke the coals and wait for them to come up to temperature. So this was the cooking beast we ended up with:




Positives: the gas kept the grill hot for several hours and the vast cooking surface was a bonus.
Negatives: no charcoal flavour; hard to control temperature (surprisingly); only narrow slits on the steel surface, so food steams and fries more than it grills.
Still, on balance probably the right choice for the occasion.

We ordered the meat from Scottish mail-order supplier Donald Russell, after having them recommended by friends. Have to say it was great quality and didn't cost too much. I'll definitely be using them again in the future.

We got three boned legs of lamb, which I marinaded in chillies, onions, garlic and Moroccan spices. Here they are looking like one massive lump of meat with a Weber meat thermometer to make sure they cooked until they were crusty on the outside and nicely pink on the inside.



Next came some Chicken Satay skewers, marinated in garlic, ginger, coconut milk, soy, sugar and turmeric (served with my patented Satay sauce). We also ordered a whole load of Donald Russell steak burgers and sausages.



Then there were the salads, which were (mostly) made the night before:

Pea, baby broadbean, spring onion and mint
Chargrilled sweet peppers
Greek Salad
Carrot, cabbage and apple coleslaw
Mixed beans with lemon zest and parsley
Mixed leaves with shredded beetroot

Plus 6kg of roasted new potatoes, which we forgot to put out and left in the oven until everyone left and we suddenly remembered. Never mind.



Well, everyone left happy. I didn't feel quite as in control of the cooking as I would have done over charcoal, but it all turned out alright...