West Sumatra, Indonesia (Minangkabau)
Rendang
Beef simmered in coconut milk and spice paste until the liquid evaporates and the meat fries in its own concentrated paste — Minangkabau's gift to the world.
Cook until the wet turns into dry.
Rendang is the same pot for four hours, but the dish you have at hour one and the dish you have at hour four are not related. At first it's a wet curry (*gulai*). After two hours of reducing it becomes a darker stew (*kalio*) — many Western kitchens stop here and call it rendang. At hour four the coconut milk has split, the oil is back out, the spices are toasting in their own paste, and the beef is frying in a brown mahogany glaze. That is rendang.
4 · Plate
West Sumatra, Indonesia (Minangkabau)
Rendang
Beef simmered in coconut milk and spice paste until the liquid evaporates and the meat fries in its own concentrated paste — Minangkabau's gift to the world.
A dish of the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra. UNESCO has flagged the ritual cooking of rendang as part of Indonesian intangible cultural heritage; CNN ran a global poll in 2011 that voted it the world’s most delicious food, which is the kind of result a sufficiently long-cooked beef will produce.
The spice paste — bumbu — is the soul of the dish. Shallots, garlic, galangal, ginger, turmeric, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, dried chilies — ground into a wet paste, fried into the coconut milk until the oil splits out. After that, the dish is a function of patience: stir, wait, stir, wait, until the colour has gone from yellow to brown to mahogany and the kitchen smells like a different continent.
Keeps for a week.
The original purpose of the long cook was preservation — a low-water dish, sealed in spice and rendered fat, that the Minangkabau took on long journeys (*merantau*) overland. A finished rendang at room temperature keeps for days; in the fridge, for a week, getting better.