Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Burnt Beef Shin Stew - A Beautiful Disaster?


Let's take a break from the beautiful island and delicious food of Bali (I know you guys are probably sickkk of it), and get back to the normal disastrous reality *grin* (you know you miss it).

Here's another disaster, which happened quite a while ago. It was all drama drama drama. I was preparing the dish as we were expecting a friend to dine with us, and while the dish was cooking in a pressure cooker...due to its high sugar content, plus the way the meat absorb liquid...after about 15 minutes, I smelt something burning...and yep. The bottom of my almost brand new pressure cooker was pitch BLACK!!! My heart sank to my toes and I got all teary eyed seeing how my new HK$800 pressure cooker got ruined.

In between sobs, I scraped every bit and pieces of the burnt beef shin, and if you cut away the burnt parts, which was about 80% of it...it was actually tasty. Smoky (of course), savoury, sweet, and very tender.

Eventually, I tried making the dish again, making sure that I added enough liquid, and shortened the cooking time.

Beef Shin Stew

Recipe
(serves 4)
- 1 pound of beef shin
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 1 onion, roughly chopped
- 4 cm ginger, crushed, divided
- 1 small carrot, peeled, chopped into 5mm thick chunks
- Chinese 5 spice powder, pepper, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce, brown sugar, sweet soy sauce, olive oil, hot water (the dominant flavors should be smoky and sweet)

Boil whole beef shin with some ginger, cut into 1-1.5cm thick chunks, set aside. Saute garlic, ginger, and onion, add beef shin, add seasoning, add hot water to cover the meat and cook. I used a pressure cooker, and cook it for about 15 minutes (first attempt was 25 minutes). Without a pressure cooker, simply cook in low heat until the meat is tender and all the spices and seasonings are absorbed well (about 1.5 hour minimum), check from time to time to make sure it isn't burnttttt. (Sob)


Is it just me, or the burnt version actually looks more beautiful than this boring, successful one?

Special thanks to SC, who scraped every bit of burnt parts off the pressure cooker, it is now all shiny and new. You're truly my hero!

5 comments:

Elsye said...

Rittt potone tajem banget yak...kerennn...btw endang gulindang nih kayaknya :P

EatTravelEat said...

We have had some disasters come from our pressure cooker too. You are lucky :). With our pressure cooker oil spread all over our kitchen!

Personally I think the burnt version looks yummier although a garnish would have been nice. Mainly it looks better is because it looks like it has been slowly cooking for hours and the meat looks like it is ultra tender :). But the perfect version looks great too!

Babe_KL said...

the burnt version looked like rendang :p

rita, you can removed the burnt bits by boiling some water in it. they should be able to come off quite easily. works for all sorts of pots, pans and woks

Mayuko said...

Hi There!! i'd love to try this :)
But how do you say "beef shin" in cantonese? I would need to ask because i have no idea what kind of meat i would need to buy :)

Unknown said...

Hi Mayuko, normally it is called "gum chin jin" (you can see it also in frozen section of supermarkets, it's kind of long separated pieces and normally from brazil)