The Food Canon

I am taking some cooking notes as I begin to understand how to make good Beef Serunding. It is by no means a finished recipe. But experienced cooks should find my sharing helpful.

I am now a Singaporean since 8 years ago but Malaysia is my country of birth. I can still remember growing up in a strongly multi-racial environment. I have an adopted brother, Ismail Hussein, who was loved by my mother and we treated him as family. I made friends with Malay and Indian classmates.

And I love Hari Raya visitations. We get to enjoy home made satays and this delicious beef floss (daging serunding) which were eaten with ketupat (pressed rice). Somehow, through these palate memories and I can still recall those visits. Sigh - it has been a long time since I was invited into a Malay home and enjoyed Hari Raya festivities.

I hope the recent election developments signal a new era for Malaysians and rediscovery of those better days where citizens from races were mixing well together.

Let's turn to my cooking notes.

In Malaysia and Indonesia, "Serunding" is normally reference for toasted coconut flesh, meat floss or a combination of the two.

Daging or Beef Serunding is very popular in Malay cuisine. It is the best beef jerky there is. It makes use of cheap but tough and flavourful cuts like topside, chuck and so on.

If you are familiar with making Beef Rendang (page 87, Mum's Classic Revived) or frying Kerisik (toasted coconut), this recipe is not difficult. These are the three main steps:

1. Cook the beef first and tear/floss the meat.
2. Cook the spices (rempah)
3. Add the beef and coconut meat and stir-fry till it is dry, similar to making kerisik.

It can be done in your wok and you do not need to use the oven.

Once you understand the basic, you can take this technique in many direction. You can change the spices. You can use chicken or pork, which are even easier to floss.

Beef Serunding is easy to store. You can eat it with ketupat, rice, porridge or bread. You can eat it with Nasi Ulam. If you add in more oil, it will keep well and become the "XO Sauce" from your fridge. Every meal with beef serenading can be appetising.

Here is the recipe from my first tryout:

1 kilo of topside beef, sliced in chunks

Rempah:

I have been asked if Beef rendang can be made using the Sous Vide method and the answer is absolutely yes.

For braising recipes with long cooking hours, I often use the SVmethod. I find it convenient to cook the meat beforehand as it frees up stove space and time for me to cook other dishes.

Beef rendang is one good recipe for this. I have already blogged the recipe here and it is also found in page 87 of my cookbook. Beef Rendang is a wonderful dish to serve for dinner parties and the SV way can make a delicious version. .

The traditional way of cooking beef rendang will end up with the meat picking up a lot of flavours from the rempah. For this reason, I use the cheeper and leaner cuts like chuck, top-side or shin beef.

If I am using Sous Vide, I will have better control over the meat and work at a balance where the meat almost taste like steak and yet you have  delicious rempah. I will go for higher marbled cuts like brisket or Short rib. After long SV cooking, it will have a "melt in your mouth" effect.

Sous Vide Rendang beef is not necessary better. It is just a different kind of rendang.

It involves three steps:

1. Sous Vide cook the beef for 24 to 48 hours
2. Cook the "rempah"
3. Add the beef and braise for 20-30 minutes.

In the recipe here, I am going for a green looking rendang through using green chillies. As I am not braising the rempah for a long time, it will result in a fresher looking rempah with some of the colours retained.  (??)

As for kerisik, you can now easily buy from local stores. However, there is nothing like making your own.

Ingredients

2 kg of boneless Short rib beef

For the Rempah (Paste)

To blend:
20 pieces of green chillies or 10 pieces of green chilli padi
15 Shallots
1 inch turmeric (kunyit)
1 inches of galangal (blue ginger or lengkuas)
1 inches of ginger

2 stalks of lemon grass – bruised
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp table salt
1 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp cumin powder
100 ml fresh coconut milk (optional)
2 dried tamarind slices (asam gelugur or asam keping)
2 tbsp of kerisik
3 Kaffir lime leafs, diced finely (to garnish)
1 cinnamon stick

Steps

Preparing the Kerisik

1. Use 1 grated coconut (clean, without any husks). 
2. In a wok on low fire, toast the coconut till it is brown in colour, but not burnt. Stir from time to time to prevent burning. It will take about 30 minutes.
3. Using a strong blender, blend it till it is only. You can also use mortar - will be a lot of hard work!
4. Reserve the kerisik for other use i..e Nasi Ulam. It stores well for weeks in the fridge. 

Preparing the meat

Making the rempah

If you are familiar with cooking sous vide, you would have experimented by now with slow and low SV cooking of tough but flavourful cuts like short-rib beef. If you have well-marbled cut to start with, your can be sure that the results will be spectacular after 36 or 48 hours of cooking at anywhere between 55˚C to 60˚C. Check out my previous post here.

I use it to make a Japanese Rice Bowl recently for a party of 80. I will share with you my cooking notes.

Estimating at 50gm of beef per pax, we started with about 5 kg of Angus short-rib beef, cooking it at 56˚C for 36 hours. This was of course prepared a few days before.

After it has finished cooking, cut open the vacuumed beef packs and drain the juice into a cooking pot. Heat up the pot and when the juice heats up, the scums will turn solid. Strain and keep the juice.

Fridge the beef. It will be easier to trim and cut if the meat is chilled. To prepare, trim and cut the beef into small blocks.  Some short-rib cuts have tough tendon and fats which you need to trim. And yes, keep the fats (good for "heart attack fried rice", I heard!)! Next, coat it with soy sauce before you pan sear as it will make browning easier. See photo below.


Meanwhile, prepare a the salad of cucumber, tomato, silken tofu and lettuce. Slice it into small pieces for easier eating off the bowl. Prepare a lemon and ginger dressing. Keep chilled and dressed the salads before you serve.

As for the eggs, cook it at 62˚C for 45 minutes. Keep warm till your serve it.

For the sauce, we used the remains beef juices, mirin, soy sauce and cooking sake. We added sugar to sweeten it and beef bouillon to make it more intense. Then we add the slurry of corn flour to thicken it.

Cook the Japanese rice. 6 kg will feed 80 pax nicely.

Nearing the time of the dinner, we started to pan-sear the beef blocks. Season it and then  sliced it at a thickness of about 3-4 mms.

After this, it should be easy. Plate the bowls in this order: rice, beef, egg and drizzle some of the beef sauce. Garnish with furikake - mixture of seaweed, sesame seeds and other flavouring seasonings. Some diced spring onions will be good too.

Then placed dressed salads on the side.

Lay out the bowls on a serving table. Serving dinner in a bento bowl is fast and efficient.

Cost? About $4 per bowl and it looks pretty and taste gourmet :)

Slicing the "twice-cooked" Sous vide cooked and pan-seared beef

I always thought that it is fantastic to serve Satay at a party.

I have been to some where a "Satay Man" was hired. You can smell it in the air as you walk in. And the sight of the charcoal fire which flared occasionally in the skilful pair of hands - one holding a fan and the other a bunch of satay - was always something that added a special atmosphere to the evening.

"A very important thing to realize is that tougher or fattier meats always have better flavor; this is why osso buco and the short rib are so delicious and filet mignon will never be found on a menu where I am chef.” - Mario Batali

I will be cooking a few lots of Short-rib beef this Christmas. When cooked the Sous Vide way, it turns into a stunning piece of beef which belies its price and is a great party-pleaser.

So, what is your idea of a good steak? This will work for me:

• Good flavour
• Good marbling
• Succulent & Meltingly tender
• Firm texture (as your knife cuts though it, the steak - though pink - stays firm)

And best of all, if I can have this in the confines of my home, budget and cooking equipment.

The pan in your kitchen can do a pretty good job at searing and crusting the steak. While almost any pan can do the job, my favourite pan for searing is the Greenpan. If you dry the steak in your fridge, it will make the crusting job easier.

I test the doneness of the steak by the bounce of the meat (just tap). On the average, 2 minutes per side on high fire should work for a medium to medium rare steak of about half an inch thick.

Editorial: This recipe was first posted 3 years ago. I have revised it. It is a great dish and I hope to make it again soon. It works equally well with chicken. 

This Thai dish, by the traditional name Pad Ga Prao is one of my favourite dishes.

A one-plate wonder, Chef McDang calls it a Thai national fast-food dish. Think of the aroma of fried minced beef -  with Maillard flavours in abundance - combined with fresh basil leaves, chillies, fried egg and rice. It is indeed the perfect meal.

The good news is that you can easily cook this in your own home. I agree with Leela of SheShimmers in her post of the same dish that you don't need to be an experienced cook to do this well.

What are "Maillard flavours," you may ask?

Who can resist a piece of great steak? Especially when it is:

• of excellent quality, well-marbled tender and juicy USDA Prime ribeye cut (not even choice or select)
• nicely crusted on the exterior and wondefully flavored from Mallard reactions to browning
• warmed and juicy pink on the inside

My girls love Japanese rice and meals.

This is one reason why I have made some effort to learn to cook it at home. I have posted a recipe for Chirashi rice. I like these one-bowl meals as they are convenient to make.

In this post, I will list out some details on how to make "Gyudon" or Japanese Rice Beef Bowl, using Short-rib Beef. What motivated me to cook this is the $60 bowl of rice with some beef which I had at a Japanese restaurant recently. I absolutely loved it but I found it too pricey. After making this, I really don't think I will pay for it again.

Japonica rice is widely available in our local markets and you should be able to spot it easily as the grain is shorter compared to Thai long grain rice. They come in various qualities. If you are new to cooking it, I will advise you just pick up any for a start. As you begin to cook it more often, you can try some better varieties. Go here to learn how to cook this rice and what type to buy.

How do you feed more than a hundred hungry men with BBQ beef efficiently? Most of them were from Half-way Houses, and obviously, do not get to enjoy good steaks often.

Good beef is expensive. So, how do you give them an unforgettable experience of great beef without breaking the budget?   

Sous Vide came in very handy again. I bought grain-fed short rib beef, a relatively inexpensive cut ($20+ per kilo). It was SV-ed at 55°C for 36 hours. Then left in the fridge till it was about time to serve. The beef was sliced into strips (fish finger size). It went on the BBQ for about 1-2 minutes, turning to brown all sides for the Maillard browning effect.

This is a seriously good burger. No kidding.
Since I started cooking Sous Vide Short Rib Beef in earnest, I have always thought that it would go very well in a burger.

• It is firm and yet tender.
• Succulent and moist.
• The flavour is, of course, amazing. 

I finally got down to making a burger with it  it and it has wowed everyone who has tried it.

When you think of steaks, you will normally think of sirloin or rib-eye. Or the more expensive tenderloin.

The rest are "the rest." You throw them into a stew or rendang, often cut into smaller pieces.

They are normally cheaper because they are "not tender."

There is a pre-occupation with whether a steak is "tender" and if your knife can easily cut through it, then it must be good.

Cooking with your eyes closed...literally

This will be a quick post to log in my experiments with Sous Vide cooking.

While I was sleeping...

Monday evenings are normally reserved for dinner with the wider family. Having chanced upon a vacuum sealed marinated Rib-eye Roast at a nearby supermart which was going for half price, it was indeed time for SV. 

I put the 1.4kg meat into the SV (rice) cooker for 6 hours at 55°C (meduim-rare). I referred to this chart to work out the time and temp.

Into the pot late in the evening and I went to sleep. By morning, it was cooked. Nearing dinner time, a few drizzles of olive oil and into the oven at 220 °C for about 12 minutes. The exterior crusted very well. Let it rest for 10 minutes before slicing. I also made the sauce from the liquid in the pack and some demi-glaze in my freezer.