Rendang

As tradition built it

Serves 6. 7 to 8 hours, largely unattended after the first hour.

Ingredients

• 1 kg beef, topside or shin, cut into 18 to 20 pieces
• 1.5 litres coconut milk (santan), full fat
• 150 g curly red chilli
• 40 g shallot
• 40 g garlic
• 30 g candlenut (kemiri)
• 60 g galangal (lengkuas)
• 1 g clove
• 30 g lemongrass (serai)
• 1 turmeric leaf (daun kunyit), whole
• 4 lime leaves
• 1 g asam gelugur
• 100 ml cooking oil
• to taste salt, to taste
• 100 g toasted grated coconut (kerisik), to finish

Method

1. Grind the chilli, shallot, garlic, candlenut and galangal to a smooth paste.
2. Fry the paste in the oil until fragrant and beginning to release its own oil (Rung 2).
3. Combine the thick coconut milk with the fried paste in one large, heavy pot, add the lemongrass, clove, turmeric leaf, lime leaves and asam gelugur, and bring to a simmer, stirring until the oil begins to separate and the aroma fully develops.
4. Add the beef and bring back to a simmer.
5. Cook at a gentle simmer, never a boil, stirring near continuously as the liquid reduces, moving through gulai (wet, reddish brown, roughly the first hour), to kalio (thickened, deeper brown, meat cooked and tender, roughly two to three hours in) to rendang proper.
6. Continue reducing over low heat for a further four to five hours, stirring with increasing frequency toward the end to prevent catching as the santan fully breaks. Fold in the kerisik as the sauce approaches its final dark, dry stage.
7. The dish is finished when the sauce has all but disappeared into the meat, the colour has gone near black, and the meat has firmed slightly. Salt to taste.

What a modern chef changes

The reduction protected, not shortcut.

Rung 1

Method

1. Brown the meat, then cook it sous vide at 74°C for 18 hours, while the paste and coconut milk are reduced separately on the stove through the gulai and kalio stages exactly as above.
2. Combine the sous vide meat with the reduced sauce and finish together over direct heat, on a Big Green Egg run with real wood for smoke character, echoing the wood-fired method used by Jakarta chef Marco Lim, until the sauce reaches the same dark, oil-broken final stage. This preserves the Maillard browning, the spice penetration and the genuine oil break that make rendang rendang, while removing the single hardest part of the traditional method for a home cook: the risk of scorching in the final hour.
3. Never chinois the finished sauce. Straining out the kerisik and the visible spice paste removes exactly what carries the dish's identity and its preservation chemistry; a smoothed, French-style rendang sauce betrays the dish's own logic, which is precisely that it never needed that kind of refinement to be sophisticated.