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| STRIPS OF BEEF COOKED IN A MALAY-INDONESIAN STYLE |
I
don't eat a lot of beef, and hardly cook it. But whenever I eat out
at a Malay or Indonesian restaurant, I like to have something called
dendeng daging. These are thin slices of beef cooked with chilli and
other spices until dry. They're almost like beef jerky, except
that they are a little saucy as well.
Not
everyone does it well, but when they do, it usually happens after a
lengthy process of first poaching large chunks of beef until tender,
then cutting each chunk into slices and pounding them out to make
them even thinner. In some recipes, the thin slices of meat are first dried out under the sun before finally cooking them with a blend of spices
into a rich, unctuous dish.
I'll
leave all that to the experts and enjoy the dish when I go eat at a
restaurant, but at home, I'm keeping it simple.
Dendeng
Daging (Spicy Beef Strips)
Serves
4
500g
beef, cut into medium large chunks
2 tsp
cumin seeds
1 tsp
black peppercorns
2 tsp
lime juice
4
tbsp cooking oil, divided
½ tsp
turmeric powder (or 1 fresh turmeric leaf, finely shredded)
1
tbsp palm sugar
Salt
to taste
Blend
together into a paste
1
medium onion
4
cloves garlic
2
shallots
2 red
chillies
Use a
meat mallet to pound the chunks of beef into thin cutlets about the
size of half your palm. Fry the cumin seeds and peppercorns in a dry
pan for a few minutes, then grind/pound finely and add to the beef
with the lime juice. Marinate for 1 hour.
Heat
2 tbsp oil and and saute the blended paste until fragrant. Add the
beef pieces and stir together until almost dry. Mix in 3-4 tbsp
water, cover and cook on low heat until beef is tender, stirring
occasionally.
Stir
in remaining oil and bring to the boil.
Add
the turmeric powder or shredded leaf, palm sugar and salt to taste.
Stir until the gravy is thick and oily, and the beef is well coated
with it. Remove from heat and serve.
Have
Dendeng Daging with
Kerabu (Malay
salads)
and
afterwards, Tepung
Gomak (Green Bean Flour-coated Patties)
Ya I too don't cook beef or mutton at home but love to eat the malay beef rendang very much, I don't recall seeing this dendeng before, must look out for it next time:) Yours looks delicious I love your purple rice:D
ReplyDeleteThanks Jeannie. And that purple rice was a surprise. It is actually brown rice cooked with just a little black "wild rice" (this is what the packet says, but it wasn't what I expected) and the whole pot turned purple! More on this rice in a future post.
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