Kadhai Lamb: The Reckoning
No, see. It really isn't lamb.
It is beef.
After Cat and I went to Devon Avenue, the gears in my head began, y'know, whirring. Cams meshed with other cams, things spun on little brass axles, and a series of christmas bulbs sprang into halting light within my imagination.
Poof. "Lamb is expensive."
Poof. "My sister would never eat lamb, anyway."
Poof. "I could use beef!"
Poof. "Hindus don't eat beef; it's inauthentic."
Poof. "It was a pakistani restaurant."
Poof. "It's authentic!"
Poof. "... where do I find a recipe?"
I cross-referenced the term 'Kadhai Lamb' and found a bunch of other intersecting terms for the same thing - I got Kadhai/Kadai the least - what I was more likely to come up with in a Google search were 'Karahi Lamb' or 'Bhuna Gosht', which mean about the same thing. A Karahi is an indo-pakistani cookpot - half pot, half skillet. It's rather like a wok, but with a flat bottom and different handles. So a wok will do fine, because most Americans, by my reckoning, don't own karahis. If you don't have a wok, this recipe should work in a regular pot, but you'll want to use a skillet for the fast frying bits.
So, after reviewing three or four recipes, I stitched together the bits of the ones I liked the most, took out the yogurt, exchanged ghee for olive oil, and I came up with something that tasted pretty damn good. I call it Bhuna Gora, or "The White Foreigner's Version Of The Aforementioned".
A note on ghee: Ghee is clarified yak butter, but it's a cinch to make it out of any readily available unsalted butter. Place a stick of butter or two in an oven-safe crock and put it in a 400-degree (fahrenheit) oven for about twenty minutes. Skim the opaque milk solids and you've got clarified butter. Ghee apparently has a hearty, nutty taste, but to be honest, I was too lazy to prepare it, because I didn't think it was necessary.
here's why. Regular butter starts to burn at around 250 degrees fahrenheit, or so Wikipedia tells me - Ghee has a much higher tolerance for heat, and olive oil does too. if the flavor is what's really super-important to you, rather than the frying medium, then use ghee. Otherwise, I don't think it'll make a difference.
So. Here goes.
you need:
3 bay leaves
1 teaspoon chili powder
2 teaspoons curry powder
2 pounds beef/lamb, cubed
1 teaspoon ginger, sliced thin
4 cloves garlic (two tablespoons), minced fine
2 tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1/4 cup Ghee/olive oil
1 onion, chopped
10 each peppercorns
6 cloves
step one! Begin with a nice clean cooking surface.
Hi, Nice Clean Cooking Surface. Now say goodbye. Actually, no - this recipe is remarkably clean. I was pleased.
Now, behold the beef. You're gonna need about two to three pounds of chuck. It's cheap meat. Look at the picture and you'll see it was, what? $3.58 a pound? Not bad.
Remember what I said a few entries ago? Don't buy cheap meat. I know. That doesn't mean you can't buy chuck. It means you shouldn't buy clearance meat. Leave that for the iron-stomached. Or the foolish. Don't be either.
The reason chuck is so inexpensive is because it's stew meat. It'd make horrible steak, because it's so tough, but you wouldn't make stew out of sirloin, because it'd fall apart. it's too tender. Part of the idea behind what makes good stew meat is that it has to be able to withstand a lot of sustained high temperature and not disintegrate. Cooking meat, y'know, denatures the proteins within it and essentially reformats the thing. A more tender cut of meat can't handle the abuse from stewing, and won't be anything but squishy.
But you sure can't eat a three-pound hunk of meat by itself. And you should probably remove the fat before you throw it into the ol' stewpot.
This is why Man invented the cleaver.
Butchering a cut of meat is a pain in the ass, but I kind of like it. Removing the fat isn't super-necessary, because you can fish it out of the stewpot later. if you wanna do that, then freeze the meat first, before you cut it. Then let it defrost a little so that it's still pretty firm. It's easier to cube if it's kind of firm and cold.
So! Cube that beef and put it in a large pot.
Mince a clove or two of garlic and huck 'em in the pot.
Note the Monkey Island CD in the napkin holder. It. ... it is not for wiping your face with. It is for playing. Okay, then you're gonna braise the beef for forty-five minutes - cover the beef with water and bring it to a boil, and then simmer, covered.
After forty-five minutes, the beef should look a little like this. It needn't be completely cooked through, but it should look at least a little brown.
Remove the pot from the heat and let it stand for about twenty minutes. When it's stood for about ten minutes, start preparing the wokthings.
What are the wokthings, you say?
place the bay leaves* (see note at bottom), cloves, and peppercorns in a cute little "I'm On A Cooking Show!" ramekin. I hate to admit how terribly useful these things are. But they are terribly useful. I wish I had, like, a dozen of them but we've only got two. they're brilliant for pre-measuring spices, which is something that a good cook ought to do but never does. Do you? I am asking you now. I bet you don't. I don't. Am I a good cook? Well, you can decide that.
Meanwhile these things are adorable:
Then you have to chop an onion. Heather told me that nobody needs to be told how to cut up an onion. But I can dice one in about forty seconds. If you can do that, skip the next three pictures and look at me eating a piece of onion. Oh, how cute I am! Lookit my lil' David mouth chewing on things.
...
(I think I have distracted them. Let us continue this lesson in secret.)
David's unnecessarily didactic guide to chopping an onion
Step one.
Remove the knobs at each end of the onion and remove the skin. then halve the onion on its central axis - the vertical one. then lay each half on your cutting board, flat side down.
Make a series of cuts that do not fully slice through the entire onion - go maybe about 5/6ths of the way. The idea is to retain some of the connective onion tissue.
Step Two.
Turn the onion sideways and cut in little eighth-inch increments, slicing perpendicular to the cuts you've made in Step One. The onion should fall apart into tiny lil' dices.
Step Three.
Revel in the glory of your speedy but safe chopping, and clean up any larger chunks that might have escaped your knife, i.e., the connective onion tissue from Step One.
Speed is not really the issue here. Speed is never the issue when working with knives. Be safe, not fast. I promise you, good knifework becomes faster eventually, because you will become bored with your pace and realize yourself capable.
ALSO VIDALIA ONIONS ARE DELICIOUS MMM SO GOOD.
Good god. I look like I have no chin. I promise that I do. See, I put these photographs up to ILLUMINATE YOU, the reader! Exposing myself and my flaws in the process. Case in point: I'm not putting my knuckles in front of the blade correctly in those last photographs.
Use white or yellow onions - red's a bit too pungent for this recipe. But yeah. You know how they say you can bite into a vidalia onion and it'll taste like an apple? I did that the other day, and it tasted like an onion. LIES. But it was a remarkably sweet onion.
Anyway, back to the recipe.
Mince the rest of your garlic. Don't forget to smash the clove before you chop it. Don't use a garlic press. I'll kill you. You've got a knife. Use it like a man. Or a woman.
Heat the quarter-cup of olive oil in your wok. Wait, no. Don't. Stop it.
Heat the wok. Then add the oil. Why's that? Uh. Ancient Chinese wisdom: "Hot wok, cold oil." But why? Why is this? Why has this venerable gobbet of wisdom survived the ocean of time's passing (Marry, why, indeed! Forsooth.)? Heating your wok first ensures that the oil won't start spattering when it gets hot - you don't want the oil to be hot for long without putting anything in it or it'll get messy.
So! heat the wok, add the oil, and put in your spices from the ramekin - sauté quickly until they become fragrant.
Then add the onion and sauté until it's soft and clear.
Meanwhile, drain the meat and get rid of that fat. you can keep the liquid for broth, usually - I put it in a gumbo I happened to be making at the time, instead of chicken broth, and it worked fine. Keep about a cup of meat broth for this recipe, though.
Anyway, add the meat to the wok and begin stir-frying, along with the ginger and garlic.
you don't need to use real fresh tomatoes. Canned, diced tomatoes work fine. Add those along with all your wonderful spices.
Really, after that it's a matter of keeping everything moving in the wok - stir-fry continuously until you've gotten rid of most of the moisture, and then add some of that beef broth you made. Then reduce it again! you want this to be almost a paste. It's a stew that lacks water almost entirely.
Initially this...
It should end up something like this!
It's not a hot dish, unless you decide to make it so. It's more aromatic than anything, honestly, rather than spicy. The curry and chili sort of give it a lift of warmth, rather than a kick, but do whatever you want.
It goes really well with rice, or naan. As for the latter - we shall learn to make it! Hooray hooray hooray.
There you have it. Bhuna Gora by David! What a doozy of an entry. Enjoy.
-D
*NOTE: I always remove the bay leaves after I've sautéed them with the peppercorns and the cloves. Right before I put the meat in, I fish the bay leaves out - after that, they're likely to get shredded, and then you'll have bitter little pieces of bay leaf floating around, which are not meant to be consumed. To give you an impression of why they're not pleasant to eat, the Oracles of Delphi used to smoke them.
I mean, go ahead if you really want, but I tell you it doesn't taste nice.