David Chang’s Dinner Time Live Will Get You Cooking
Beef Rendang
Beef rendang is a wonderfully intense braised dish from Indonesia. There are as many recipes for beef rendang as there are cooks who make it. It's a complexly flavoured dish because of the large amount of spices and herbs. If you have the time, make the rendang a day (or longer) before you intend to serve it - it will taste better after being reheated. It's usually served with rice but it also goes well with Indian bread. Serve it with pickles or a sharply flavoured vegetable dish, to balance the richness of the rendang.
I use beef cheeks for rendang, but you can also use brisket or any well-marbled cut that has a sufficient amount of tendon or connective tissue that benefits from long, slow cooking. Don't use a lean cut or the end results will be throat-chokingly dry and hard. The meat needs about three hours to simmer until it's tender, then about 30 minutes of watching it very closely - stirring almost constantly at the end - to reduce the sauce so that it's very thick. You could make it in less time in a pressure cooker, but you'll need to use less coconut milk, and you might need to adjust the amount of spices.
Purists would say that to get the best flavour, the spices should be pounded in a mortar. They're probably right, but I'm perfectly happy using my high-speed bullet blender that I bought for juicing (although I've never used it for that purpose) - it does an excellent job of making spice pastes.
Rendang usually calls for candlenuts - a nut that's very high in fat, and which is difficult to find unless you go to a good shop specialising in Southeast Asian ingredients. If you can't find them, use macadamia nuts.
There's no substitute for galangal, a rhizome that looks similar to fresh ginger (it's often called Thai ginger), but which has a different flavour. Look for it at the same Southeast Asian shop where you buy the candlenuts. It freezes well, so if you do get some, buy more than you need, then wrap it and store it in the freezer, for future dishes. If you can't find galangal, then use fresh peeled ginger, but know that the rendang will taste very different.
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