Showing posts with label beef. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beef. Show all posts

Tuesday 6 October 2020

Korea advice 2: Yang. Doenjang beef stew

How much is that Doggie in the window,
The one with the fine marbling through its rump?

OK, so it's time to address the elephant in the room when it comes to Korean cuisine. And the elephant I'm referring to is furry, has a waggly tail and pisses on lamposts. As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not afraid to approach some of the more unsavoury subjects related to food so, yes, I'm going there: the eating of dogs. This is something of a custom in Korea, at least according to good old Wikipedia, though it's now banned to slaughter dogs for food, yet it's still legal to eat them. Where are they going to get them from? I mean, it's not like they've got a family pack of St Bernard mince or a four-pack of Labrador burgers in Aldi, or whatever the equivalent is in downtown Seoul. I've covered cultural differences in food before, and we can't be at all judgemental about what people consume in other cultures. While we in the west think eating dogs is barbaric, Koreans probably regard putting a piece of mouldy, rotten milk in your mouth utterly disgusting. These things are very much relative, and, to coin a phrase, in the belly of the devourer. Having said that, given the current situation the human world finds itself in at the time of writing, the bats were probably a bad thing to eat.

I suppose it's not just the revulsion at the act of eating the meat of dogs, though. It's the fact that we're a nation of dog lovers and have trouble seeing them even as animals, much less food. We love our pooches. They're part of the family. True, a part of our family that licks its own arsehole and requires you to follow it around in order to pick up any crap that emanates from that same arsehole, but a part of the family none the less. Total dog lovers. Just don't mention dog fighting, puppy farms or severe in-breeding in pure-bred dogs giving them a shallower gene pool that the British Royal Family and leading to massive health problems, pain and suffering. Anyway, consumption of dog meat in Korea is apparently on the wain, whereas the UK will soon be feasting on a diet of rat tikka masala, mouse fricassee and cow pat soup when the food shortages hit following Brexit, or the North Korean Weight Loss Plan, as it could be called.

I'm sure all you readers will appreciate that the recipe, as written, has no canine content whatsoever. On the other hand, it's probably the meatiest dish you can make. Beef, mushrooms, soya bean paste. It's like the world festival of umami and is incredibly filling and satisfying. It's just like Mum used to make, if Mum was born in Pyongyang and was part of the ruling elite, as most North Koreans probably couldn't buy beef. Indeed, if news reports are to be believed, they can't buy much of anything since there are massive food shortages, as I alluded to above.

Glutamate (neurotransmitter) - Wikipedia
Glutamic acid
The source of umami

So, it's another long, slow cooked stew, suitable for the slow cooker. Doenjang is a fermented soya bean paste, like gochujang, but without the chilli (see my recipe for pork gochujang, the Yin to this recipe's Yang). I suppose its closest relative you can buy fairly easily on the UK high street or supermarket is probably Chinese yellow bean sauce, though they do taste distinctly different.

TIMING
Preparation: 20 minutes, plus soaking for the shitake mushrooms
Cooking: Six hours plus in the slow cooker. Three hours or more on the hob

INGREDIENTS
Flavourings
Clockwise from top left: doenjang paste, chilli, garlic, ginger

2tbsp vegetable oil (not olive)
400g cubed stewing beef
1 leek, trimmed, tailed, and cut into 1cm slices
1 thumbsized chunk of ginger, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
250g potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm chunks
4 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked in a mug of water for at least 20 minutes then sliced, water reserved
225g tin sliced bamboo shoots, drained
150g fresh mushrooms, sliced
100g baby sweetcorn, cut into 2cm chunk
1 red chilli, finely chopped
2 tbsp doenjang paste
2 tbsp mirin

Vegetables ready to go

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a heavy pan, add the meat, and fry it until it has some colour, around 10 minutes.

Remove the beef with a slotted spoon then add the leek.

Fry for 5 minutes to soften, then add the ginger and garlic and fry for another 5.

Add the potatoes, mushrooms (both types) and bamboo shoots and baby corn and contiue to stir for a few minutes more.

Add the water from soaking the shitake mushrooms and mirin.

Return the meat to the pan, along with the chilli and doenjang paste.

Stir well and put in the slow cooker on medium for 6 hours or more, or else cover and leave on a low heat on the hob.

Check the post intermittently and add the odd splash of water if it looks to be getting too thick or dry


Makes more than enough for two people, served with boiled, steamed or egg-fried rice.


NOTES
Beef is the best meat for this dish, but it may work with pork or lamb. You could even get away with chicken, but might have to use a little less doenjang. In fact, add more potato, leave out the beef and you would have a very hearty vegetarian version and it could be the meatiest vegan dish you could imagine. 

This works well with plenty of vegetables. Potato really absorbs the flavour of the sauce fantastically, so you need to keep this in. Otherwise, mess about with the vegies to your heart's content. Water chestnuts would work well, as would courgette (add towards the end of cooking or it will disintegrate in the slow cooker), cauliflower should stand up to the flavour or green pepper would also work

Dried shitake mushrooms add another dimension, over and above regular mushrooms, and the water you rehydrate them in adds further depth to the stew. You could omit them if you can't get hold of them, and maybe add a vegetable stock cube plus 200ml water.

Mirin is essentially rice wine. Replace with the same amount of dry white wine or dry sherry if you can't get hold of it.

I know the whole thing about eating dogs is often used as a racist trope directed at anyone who is a member of any Far Eastern ethnic minority in the UK. It's just a short hop from this to urban legends of cats going missing around Chinese takeaways which, as well as being offensively racist, quite frankly don't make sense. Given your average takeaway probably gets through a good couple of dozen chickens on a good night, the odd cat isn't really going to save an awful lot of money, and the risk of being caught and losing business too great. Snopes has a good discussion of this urban legend here  an article that is now over 20 years old and refers to these stories from the mid twentieth century, so it's hardly new, and is just as much a load of bullshit now as it was then.

Adam and the Ants addressed eating dogs way back in the early 80s. Well, they didn't, not literally, but it was still a decent song.

It would be remiss of me not to post this track

Sunday 21 February 2016

Beef and Orange Tagine

I mentioned when I did a previous tagine recipe that I really have a problem with sweet fruit in savoury recipes. I then completely had an arse-about-face moment and subsequently wrote up recipes for pineapple sambal and pineapple fried rice. However, that doesn't count because the sambal is a relish and the rice is an accompaniment. My blog, my rules. And that same rule is getting bent just a little bit more now with this with its actual orange content. Well, at least it's not apricots, prunes or raisins that not only don't deserve a place in any dish, savoury or sweet, but actually ought to be projected into the heart of the fucking sun because they are the very stones from the devil's own infernal gall bladder.

Regular guest star of this blog, Rick Stein, usually twats on endlessly about how he's made such-and-such a dish for years, after being taught how to cook it when he was staying at a chateau in France or something. Another famous chef, Nigel Slater, also seems to only cook things that he ate as a child just how his Mum made it. Recipes all done and dusted, all ingredients bought and prepared. However, in sweary cooking, you sometimes have to busk it a little, or, in the words of Blackadder, "Needs must when the devil vomits in your kettle". I'd planned on cooking up a nice lamb tagine but, could I find any lamb in my local shops? Could I bollocks! I bought some beef and decided to improvise this and it turned out quite well.

TIMING
Preparation 15-20 minutes
Cooking 3 hours

INGREDIENTS
2tbsp olive oil
400g cubed stewing beef
1 medium to large onion, roughly chopped
3 large cloves garlic, crushed
Zest and juice of one orange
1 courgette, sliced
2 large tsp ras-el-hanout
1 carrot, sliced
1 tbsp tomato puree
pinch saffron
250 ml water
1 chicken stock cube

RECIPE
 Heat the oil in a flame proof casserole dish or tagine on the hob.

Add the beef and brown before removing with a slotted spoon

Turn down the heat, add the onion and garlic to the pot and allow to sweat for 10 minutes.

Throw in the carrot and carry on frying gently for another 5 minutes

Add the courgette and ras-al-hanout for a minute return the meat to the dish then add the rest of the ingredients.

Mix well, replace the pot lid and put in an oven at 150 for three hours, checking every hour or so.

Add a little more water if the dish starts to get a bit dry.

Serve it up with something like couscous, with or without a nice Moroccan flat bread


NOTES
As I said in my preamble, I had planned to make a lamb tagine but I couldn't get any lamb. I got beef and then figured orange would go well with beef and worked from there. This recipe may actually work OK with lamb but I've not tried it.

Ras-el-hanout is one of those wanky-sounding spice mixes that are listed in ingredients of recipes like this when they appear in the Grauniad. I'm reliably informed that this means "top of the shop" in Arabic because it contains the best ingredients they sell in the local spice shop. In actuality it's essentially a variation on a mild curry powder, with an emphasis on aromatic rather than hot spices It's not that different to garam masala (yes, I realise that is another wanky-sounding spice mix, but it's a little less obscure), though if you do use garam masala, this dish will taste a lot like your regular curries.

You could blend your own R-e-H and there are lots of suggestions of which spices to use online, though I bought some from my fave Asian supermarket Mullaco which I swear by. Actually, given the nature of my cooking style, I swear by pretty much fucking everything

Whilst I actually enjoyed this dish, Mrs Sweary thought it was perhaps had a little too much orange, so you might consider halving the amount of orange zest. On the other hand I suspect Mrs Sweary is actually one of the crows from the Kia-Ora advert below. It's actually quite difficult to believe something like this was not only acceptable on UK TV in the 80s, and yet seems to be remembered with some fondness today. It's actually more racist that a UKIP member's wet dream. Whatever, the point is my beef tagine with orange is too orangey for Mrs Sweary. It's just for me and my dog.


I'll be your dog
More offensive black stereotypes than you can shake a burning cross at. But, hey, it's just to sell juice

Admit it, this the first cooking blog that has used the word "vomits" that you have read.

Monday 16 November 2015

Burgers!

William Shakespeare was not only probably the greatest writer in the English language, he was also incredibly prophetic, when his witches from Macbeth accurately predicted the composition of your standard burger available on the British High St, 500 years after his death (see above). Generally, if a burger is made of crap it will taste like crap. Mind you, putting a slightly different spin on things, who needs to go to the zoo to see lots of animals when you can take a bite of a cheap burger and have an entire menagerie parading across your tongue and into your stomach? It's like a multi-species game of Operation "I'll go for the aardvark pancreas, then the walrus foreskin, and the hypothalamus of a couple of squirrels". On more pertinent note, a good burger can be a wonderful culinary experience and even better if you make it yourself and you know what's in it.

Authentic street or peasant food is often wonderful and can tell you a lot about the place it originates and the people who make and eat it. This stuff is often made for workers in offices, in the fields, those cleaning streets, often all standing in the same queue, all of whom need something quick, cheap and nutritious. More than that, good street food thrives through word of mouth recommendation so any street food seller depends on the quality of their offerings and is therefore usually made with more than a little bit of love. It's often eaten on the hoof, or at plastic tables at the side of the road, served from a shack, a kiosk or just a barrow. Think Belgian waffles, Thai noodles, German wurst and even, dare I say it, Gregg's pasties. On the other hand, street food is also one of those current wanky food fads that are increasingly misappropriated of late by middle class people in gingham shirts and tweed, sporting ridiculous facial hair (aka fucking "hipsters") and sold from the "pop-up" restaurant. These are the sort of people who had a couple of tacos at Chiquito's and then decided to go off touting their food as authentically Mexican when, in fact, all they've done is buy an economy tub of Old El Paso fajita mix and thrown it over some Iceland chicken portions in a huge fuck-off bucket the previous night before banging them out from the back of a trailer for a tenner a pop.

Hamburgers get their name because they were once street food in Hamburg, or maybe it was because  they were produced by German immigrants in America. Actually, the true origin of the burger seems a bit fucking hazy. Well, after a cursory Google search it does, at any rate. Wherever the thing started, the hamburger basically uses cheap cuts of beef and makes them quick to cook, easy to eat and downright delicious if done right, so what's not to love?

Now, while it's true that hamburgers are still very much the food for poor, lazy or inebriated people, with our streets lined with fast food outlets, many upmarket restaurants now also have them on their menus. Probably the most ridiculous and obscene example is something like the Fleur Burger made in Las Vegas and costs $5000. OK, it's not really your normal hamburger. It's got truffles in it and it's made with Wagyu beef, but it's a bit of a stretch that one of these is a few hundred times better than a Big Mac. Wagyu beef is rumoured to be the very best sort of beef there is, as the cows it comes from are given the finest grain, plied with beer and their farmers massage them and probably fellate them on a daily basis, all in an effort to give beautifully fat-marbled beef. This attention doesn't come cheap, making Wagyu beef the most expensive form of cow flesh in the world. I have trouble understanding what sort of fuckwit takes the finest quality steak, mashes it up then puts it back together again in the form of a burger. It's the kind of cuisine that kind of makes you hope for a shred of truffle getting stuck in the recipient's windpipe. Nothing fatal, you understand, just enough to require a fairly violent and undignified Heimlich Manoeuvre to project the sliver (all couple of hundred quidsworth) across the room.


The Heimlich Manoeuvre
Never has the line between first aid instruction and soft-core gay porn been so blurred
Source:http://www.firstaidreference.com/first-aid-for-choking-heimlich-maneuver-adult-choking-infant-choking/139/

INGREDIENTS

 ½ medium sized red onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves
1 tbsp olive oil
500g beef*
2 tsp Worcester sauce
dash Tabasco sauce
pinch mixed herbs
1 tsp smoked paprika
½ tsp (or more) freshly ground black pepper
½ tsp coarse grain mustard
salt
1 medium egg

To serve:
Buns

Grated cheese
mixed leaf salad
Tomatoes, sliced
1 red onion, sliced
Gherkin slices

Ketchup
Mayonnaise
Mustard
Chilli sauce
Sliced jalapenos

*The beef can be mince, stewing beef like chuck steak or, on a couple of occasions, I've used some very cheap sirloin steak from my local butcher which was awful as steak but made pretty good burgers. If not using mince, remove any really stringy or gristly bits from the meat then chop it roughly. I'll twat on about this more in the notes

RECIPE
Heat the oil is a small pan and add the onions and garlic to fry gently until soft, around10 minutes.

Allow to cool and add it to a food processor along with all the other ingredients. If you don't have a food processor, you need to use mince and mix everything together by hand in a bowl though the texture won't quite be as fine and the burger is more likely to break apart when you cook it

Take a quarter of the mixture, roll it into a ball then squash it into a patty between your hands.

Alternatively, if you're a foodie wanker like me, you might possess a burger press which means you can make nice, regular-shaped burgers.

When formed you can keep these in the fridge for a while if need be, for example if you are planning to barbecue them later, and they also freeze pretty well too.

A burger press doing its stuff


Smear the burgers with a little oil, slap them into a hot griddle pan and cook for maybe 4-5 minutes each side, turning regularly. Alternatively do them on the barbecue where they taste fantastic.

Unlike steak, the suggestion is that burgers are cooked through. See notes.

Before

After
Perfectly griddled

Stripes like this are NEVER out of season

Toast the bun a couple of minutes before the burgers are cooked then serve them on the buns with the salad ingredients plus condiments of your choice. Serve them up with chips, or better still, potato wedges like these I posted a while back.

Done to perfection
I'm not going to win any awards for food photography.  I'm not David fucking Bailey, OK?


NOTES
I've tried making burgers a few times in the past and they never worked as they tasted just like mince. The key is in the other things that go into the mix: the onions, garlic and condiment.

Having tried this with different types of beef, they all have different properties. The cheap sirloin I used tasted great but the burgers were a bit dry. Chuck steak made burgers that were a bit more moist but still a little drier than I prefer. Mince made the best patties in terms of being moist as it's all down to the fat content so cheap mince would probably work best as it has a higher percentage fat. This means that the cost of the burgers is really low as well, and the recipe could even be classed as yet another of my mince wonder.

Burgers ought to be cooked through completely. This is apparently true even if they are made from steak. The reason is because if you cook a steak, the bugs are on the outside and get killed by the searing whilst the under-cooked inside stays fairly bug-free (don't mention the parasites!). However, if you mash it all up to make a burger, the bugs are then spread through the whole patty. Saying this, I'd risk doing a burger rare if it was made from steak, but if it's made from mince you really need to make sure they are cooked properly. Besides, minced beef tastes like shit if it's under cooked.

The composition of the final burger in its sandwich form is very much a personal thing: how much salad, what salad ingredients, which sauces. Personally I like some cheese, a bit of lettuce, some sliced tomato, sliced onion, sliced gherkin, mayonnaise, ketchup or some sort of chilli sauce and perhaps some jalapenos. Mrs Sweary, on the other hand, has her burger totally bare with perhaps a few leaves of lettuce and a bit of sliced onion, a statement which would not have been out of place in the script of a Carry On film or indeed on my blog entry for pork afelia.

Thursday 15 October 2015

Mongolian Beef Stew

The flag of Mongolia.
It's rather nice
Undoubtedly the most famous Mongolian is Genghis Khan who ruled the Mongol hordes that rampaged across Central Asia into Eastern Europe in the 13th century. He was also, according to legend, the grandfather of Kublai Khan who, besides being probably the world's second most famous Mongolian, was also a dab hand at building. Well, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem named after him, at any rate. Coleridge wrote "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree". Apparently this Xanadu place was fucking immense. It was so big it had a river running through it, entire forests and even the odd hill. This description may need to be taken with a bit of a pinchof salt, though since, Coleridge was out of his head on opium when he wrote it. Mind you, it does appear to detail what was probably the very first concept of a theme park. He'd basically invented Disneyland but was too off his tits to build it. The poem also gave rise to the wonderful slice of 70s cheese from Olivia Newton John and ELO, below, from the film of the same name. I don't think that version of Xanadu was in Mongolia, besides which, Coleridge would have been having some truly nightmarish hallucinations if he had dreamt up the roller disco, assuming there was room to build one between the many an incense bearing tree or sinuous rills.

Xanadu by ONJ and ELO with appearances from Gene Kelly, no less

Anyway, back on topic. There are a few other ethnically named dishes on the blog that aren't especially authentic and this is one no different. My Mongolian beef stew is about as Mongolian as my arse. For a start it's not made with yak, has no trace of fermented ewe's milk to bulk it up and it's been nowhere near a yurt. It is based on recipes I found in a few sources claiming to have Mongolian provenance, though these also seem more Amir Khan than Genghis Khan but, fuck it, it's got soy sauce, black bean sauce and water chestnuts in it, so how exotic do you want?

Frequently twatted on about by regular blog guest, Rick Stein, when he's waxing lyrical about how they are "so comforting" or "like mother used to make", stews are generally easy, cheap and filling. Thing is, my mother used to make the most boring fucking stews ever. I was lucky if it had a stock cube in it. Even so, meat cooked for a fucking age with vegetables will develop a reasonable taste on its own. Therefore it doesn't take much more to make a stew or casserole that tastes great. Often in the West we do this by cooking in booze, like French Boeuf Bourguinon in wine, beef in Guinness or Carbonnade (pork in beer) from Belgium. Many oriental dishes use lots of coconut to give fragrant, creamy stews. However, this recipe, has lots of soy sauce and black bean sauce which combines with the slow-cooked beef to give a thick, rich, satisfying plateful of genuine comfort with an exotic flavour. It's basically oral sex from a furcoat-wearing Ulaanbataar prostitute in casserole form

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
400g diced stewing beef
1 onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 carrot, peeled and sliced
1 tin water chestnuts (140g drained weight), drained and sliced
200ml water
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp dry sherry
120g black bean sauce
pinch dried chilli flakes
Black pepper
pinch 5 spice powder
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tsp honey

RECIPE
Pour the oil in a pan and heat then add the beef and sautée until browned. Remove with a slotted spoon.

To the remaining juices and oil add the onion and garlic then fry until soft. Throw in the carrot and water chestnuts and return the meat to the pan.

Add the water, soy, sherry and black bean sauce and stir.

Stir in the chili flakes, 5 spice and plenty of black pepper then mix in the tomato puree and the honey.

Stir well and heat to boiling in the pan.

Cover and turn the heat right down then leave to gently simmer for at least two hours, stirring occasionally. The meat should be nice and tender, almost falling apart.

In the pan it looks like any other stew

Makes enough for two people served with rice, and looks like this:



NOTES
I got onto this recipe because my wife happened to mention that she fancied something made with lamb. I went to my local Co-Op where they had no lamb, so I got beef instead. Besides, it works best as a beef dish with the thick dark gravy made from the soy sauce. Pork or lamb may also work but you might need to tone down the soy sauce, perhaps using light rather than dark.

For black bean sauce, I used Blue Dragon Black Bean Stir Fry sauce, mainly because it was the only thing they had involving black beans in my local super market. This may be a bastardised version of black bean sauce, with all sorts of other stuff in it for the purposes of stir frying, but it works.You could use some more authentic black bean sauce as purchased from a Chinese grocer (or bigger supermarket) if you can be arsed. If using real black bean sauce, add about two big tablespoons.

Many vegetables you might want to put in a stew that needs to cook for a long time will disintegrate by the time the meat is tender enough to eat (eg peppers, courgette). Hard root vegetables work best in maintaining their integrity, like the carrots in this version, which go soft as long as they don't get cooked too long. Water chestnuts, however don't change in the slightest and stay crispy. They are integral to the dish add crunch to the meat which should be falling apart by the time the recipe is served. Another good thing about them is they are tinned so having a couple of tins in the cupboard means you can make this anytime you fancy

You could leave out the chilli flakes if you're not a fan of heat. Also, it's a good idea to not add too much 5 spice powder because if you overdo it, the whole thing will taste like aniseed balls.