Daging Berempah, Spiced Beef Stew "Malaysian Monday 9"

It is the time of the week again and today I am very excited to share with you a very interesting and delicious beef stew. What caught my attention initially was the ingredients used in the recipe; no onion and garlic in a Malay recipe? and it reads like a Chinese red cooked beef with the additional Malay spices and Indian herbs, one simply has to try it! This is adopted from part of a collection of Malay recipes by Melbourne food writer Tony Tan in a very old issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller. The magazine mysteriously gone missing when I was about to cook the dish, so this is something I recreated using roughly the same ingredients. I cooked this twice in a week and I will let you figure out why. This is the last week before our 2nd roundup of Muhibbah Malaysian Monday, so send in all your entries to me @ sureshchong@yahoo.com by the end of the week. 

P.S Chicken will work beautifully in this dish; simply coat chicken pieces with some salt and turmeric powder then fry til golden before continuing. Reduce the cooking time  of course.

serves 4 as part of a Malaysian meal
you'll need;
1 kg of gravy beef/chuck steak, cut across the grains into 1.5 cm slices
3 tbs of cooking oil
1 stalk of curry leaves
3 tbs of dark soy
2 tbs of kecap manis
2 tbs of sugar
2/3 cup of tamarind concentrate
3 to 5 dried chillies
stock or water
1 red chili, finely diced (garnish)

for the spice mix;
1 tbs of cumin seeds
1 tbs of fennel seeds
1 tbs of black peppercorns
10 cloves
2 star anise
3 cm piece of cinnamon
1 stalk of curry leaves

Beef and instant tamarind concentrate.

Prepare the spice mix.

Fry spice mic in a heavy bottom pot for 30 seconds on medium heat then add in the curry leaves.

Immediately add in the beef and coat the beef well in the spice mixture. Add in a few whole dried chillies for the extra background kick. Fry the beef for 5 minutes.

Next add seasonings, tamarind and enough water or stock to submerge the beef. Cover and simmer for 1.5 - 2 hours.

Uncover the pot in the last 10 minutes of the cooking time to reduce the sauce a little.

Sprinkle with some diced chillies and serve with plenty of steamed rice.

I cooked this twice in a week and that is how delicious it is!

If you have eaten or cooked any Malaysian meal recently, please join us and share with us your recipes and experience. All you need to do is grab the batch above and place it at the end of your post, linking it back to us of course. Since I am hosting the event this month, send me an email for the link to your post :)  Click HERE to find out more.