Mastering Traditional Beef Rendang Curry with Slow-Cooked Flavors

Five, six, seven, eight. Have a chicken. You're filming that, aren't you? Welcome to Walk Wednesdays here at the School of W, London's premium Asian cookery school. Today we're going to be making beef renang and I'm going to show you how to master complex, deep flavors that develop over slow cooking. Okay, so we're going to start with our curry paste. The curry paste is the most important part of this dish. Um, so let's take you through the elements. We've got our dried uh chilies. We're going to deseed these in a minute and soak them. I'm going to show you how. We've got some fresh red chili as well.

Uh, we use both cuz this gives us a smoky flavor. This gives us like a sweet fruity flavor. We've got our lemongrass for that citrusy aroma. Genal and ginger. We've got some turmeric as well. We've got our Thai shallots and garlic. And then we've got a few whole spices that we're going to add as well um to the curry. So, we're going to add some lime leaf. And we've got cinnamon as well and some cloves. All of this will be in the description below. So, we're going to soak our dried chilies now. And I'm going to show you a quick and easy method to do a lot of them in one go. Um these dried chilies are not super spicy.

They're not dry bird's eyes. They're just your sort of medium red chili that has been dried. The drying process really brings out a kind of smoky flavor, um, earthy flavor from the chilies. We're also going to be using some fresh red chili. And the reason we use both is they're giving us those two different flavors. So, sort of earthy smokeoky and then like fresh fruity from the uh fresh chili. So to deseed these, what I like to do is just take a pair of scissors and just cut the end off and chuck straight into a bowl. Okay, we're going to use about sort of 10 to 15 chilies for this recipe. If you come to one of my classes at the School of W, the chances are I will say at the start of the class that one of the dishes is my favorite.

Um, the only time I'm really telling the truth is if you're here for the Indonesian class because this beef endang is my absolute uh favorite. Okay, so here's my little tip. Into a bigger bowl. Lock bowls together and shake rhythm. Not my strong suit. And what you should find is that all the seeds have dropped to the bottom. You can repeat this a few times if you really are sort of worried about the seeds, but I'm not worried about one or two being in there, so I'm just going to crack on.

Okay, so now we're going to prepare the aromatics for our curry paste. Okay, we've got our dried red chili here. We've got our fresh. We've got our lemongrass for that lovely citrusy aroma. We've got our regular ginger and our blue ginger, our galang gal as well. We've got our turmeric for its earthy flavor. And we've got our Thai shallots, pungent sweets, and our garlic as well. And then we've got our whole aromat that are going to go into the curry as well. We've got some cloves, some cinnamon, and a little bit of lime leaf. Okay, so let's make our curry paste. Okay, we're doing this by hand in a pestle and mortar for best results. Uh the first thing I'm going to start with is a tiny

bit of salt. So about a/ quart teaspoon of salt. Obviously, this is going to add salt to our curry, but what the salt does is it acts as an abrasive and it just helps all these ingredients break down quicker. Let's start with our chilies. Generally, we want to do this gradually. And we want the things that are going to take a little bit longer to break down to go in first. So I'm starting with our chilies. So the technique here is a pounding technique. What the pounding technique does is it breaks down these aromats and gets all the essential oils out of them. Okay. So I'm going to go down and forward, down and forward, down and forward and repeat. Okay. You can

use your other hand as a guard and you just gently rotate as you go. This process is going to take about 15 20 minutes if not longer. Rendang is not a dish that you can hugely hurry. It requires a bit of time, a bit of patience and a bit of work. You can use a blender. It is quicker, obviously, less labor intensive, but all the blender is going to do is cut these ingredients really small over and over again, so it doesn't give you quite the same uh flavor. Okay. So, after about 15 20 minutes of pounding, this is what your past should look like.

Okay. So, the next thing we're going to do is make what's called a kerosick. So, kerosic is a paste that is made from toasted desiccated coconut. So, we've got our desiccated coconut here. We're going to get our pan on and we're going to toast gently. [snorts] So, we're going to get this toasting and you're going to have the most wonderful aroma in your kitchen. Obviously, you need to keep an eye on this because it will um burn quite easily. Um we're going to go the extra step of making the paste today for our kerosick. Some people will just toast the coconut and add that into the curry, but if you make the paste, it just brings out that little bit more oil and gives you that like deep roasted

coconut flavor in your curry. So, this dish is part of our full day Indonesian class at the School of W. Um, and I say this about a lot of classes, but it's probably my favorite to teach. Okay, so we've got it nice and golden and let it go for another 30 seconds. So, we've got our golden coconut into our pestl and water. And now we're going to use a grinding motion to break this down into a paste. You're getting a good workout today. Okay. And unlike earlier when we were pounding because we really wanted to pulverize those chilies, garlic, and whatnot, we are now going to switch to more of a grinding motion because we

really want to grind this down into a paste. Okay. Okay, so we have our beef here. We're using beef shin because it's got a good balance between uh fat and lean meat. As we've cut these, we've left them fairly sort of chunky. Um you want big pieces of beef because they are going to reduce down a little bit as it cooks. Um and I really want this dish to have that really like satisfying chunky beef at the end. I don't want it all to kind of um fall apart. So keep your chunks nice and big. Uh what we're going to do is add this into some coconut milk. We've got some full fat coconut milk here that we've been heating up. Okay. The idea with the renang is obviously it's um to be served

as part of a wider meal. So served with rice, but also you're going to want some vegetable side dishes in there. Um like something like a pickle will really cut through the richness of the this dish. Now, next going in is our curry paste. Um, you might think it's fairly unusual that we're not frying off our curry paste. Essentially, what happens with a renang is that we do it in reverse. So, we're going to simmer the meat in the paste first in the coconut milk. But what will happen later is the liquid will reduce. the fat will start to split from the coconut milk and then that will fry the paste, fry the beef and caramelize everything at the end. So, the paste we

made is going to go in. And we're also going to add our uh kisic that we've made. our whole spices, too. So, cinnamon is going to go in. Cloves. We've got some lime leaves here. With the lime leaves, you can just remove the stem from the middle. So, if you fold it in half and just remove the stem, that's going to release way more of that lovely citrusy aroma into our curry. Okay, we are going to give everything a good stir. This is where you find out that your pot's a little bit small for the job. And what we're using here to cook this dish is our uh cast iron walk. And the reason we're going to use the cast iron is

because it's really good at retaining the heat for the long cook. If you're interested in any of the products we're using today, check out our website. Okay, so I'm just going to bring this back to a boil and then we're going to set it to a low simmer. We're going to let it cook away for about 2 and 1/2 hours. and we'll revisit it later. So, you see we've been cooking our curry for about 2 and 1/2 hours now. The oil has split. It's all kind of really well cooked down. It smells divine. Um, what we're going to do just before we enter the last stage of cooking is season with a pinch of salt.

We're also going to go in with a teaspoon of palm sugar for sweetness. which is going to pair so well with that sort of coconut aroma from the kellis that we made. We're also going to add a sour element in the form of our tamarind. So tamarind is going to be one teaspoon as well. So we're going to let this cook now for another sort of 20 30 minutes. What we want is all the meat to absorb that oil and this become very dry indeed. At this stage you do need to pay a little bit more attention to your curry cuz it will kind of dry out and catch quite quickly. So give it a good stir every now and then. Keep an eye on it. Make sure it's not catching. And once it's fairly dry, it's ready to go.

Okay. So now our curry is ready. It's had that last sort of 20 to 30 minutes. You can see how dry it is. All that meat has absorbed that coconut oil. And I cannot wait to try this. Let's dig in. I cannot wait to try this incredible curry. Well worth the effort, well worth the time and a nice bit of beef some steamed rice. We're going to serve it with beef is really tender. Smells incredible. There's like a little bit of heat, but it's by no means like really kind of fiery hot. And just that warm kind of coconut aroma is insane.

Okay, thank you so much for watching today, guys. Um, I hope that if you've never made renang before at home, this is your reason to do so. It is well worth the time. It is well worth the effort. Thank you so much as always for watching the channel. Um, don't forget to subscribe if you're not already subscribed for more videos like this. Leave us a like and drop us a comment in the comment section below. Thank you so much for watching, guys. I'm in Sheffian from School of