Cooking under pressure

I recently visited Nada Budaya and was absolutely blown away by how delicious Malaysian food is. I was also annoyed that I’d never visited sooner despite living in Nottingham for nearly ten years! I was particularly wowed by the Beef Rendang curry that I had and was keen to try and recreate this dish at home.

Not too long after this, I went and visited my mother and sister. My mum has always used a pressure cooker – I think it’s a bit of a essential utensil in the traditional Indian kitchen because you can cook rice/lentils/meat in super fast time. I find pressure cookers terrifying. The hissing and spitting makes me think that the pot is going to blow up and ruin the kitchen. Mum had actually bought me a pressure cooker and I wondered if this would be a handy way to cook Beef Rendang and perhaps other dishes in a fraction of the time.  My mother and sister gave me a demonstration of how to use the pressure cooker without blowing myself or my kitchen up and I felt a bit confident that I would be able to use one without casualty.

When I returned to Nottingham, I did some research online and came across this recipe and thought I would give it a try. It was a bit of an experiment with the pressure cooker and I adapted the recipe in terms of quantity and cooking technique.

Here’s what I used (serves 4):

1 lemongrass stalks, dry outer leaves removed, roughly chopped

2 medium-sized red onions, quartered

3 garlic cloves, peeled

50g fresh root ginger, peeled and roughly chopped

2 plump red chillies, roughly chopped

1 tbsp sunflower oil

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

1/2 tsp ground turmeric

750g stewing steak

200ml coconut milk

2 dry kaffir lime leaves

1/2 tsp cinnamon powder

1 tsp brown sugar

juice of 1/2 lime

1 tbsp soy sauce

salt and pepper

 

Here’s what I did:

Here is my pressure cooker! It’s a particularly good one because it’s non-stick!

First I got my onions, ginger, garlic, lemongrass, chilli and garlic. I peeled the onion, garlic and ginger, removed the woody outer leaves from the lemongrass and took the stalks off the chilli. Then I roughly chopped everything up.

   Then I threw everything in the food processor. You need to blitz this until its a fine paste.

Get your spices ready. I tend to use whole coriander and cumin so I needed to grind these up.

In the picture above, the yellow powder is turmeric and then (going clockwise to centre) cumin, coriander and cinnamon.

Time to get cooking! I heated up the oil in the pressure cooker and fried off the paste for about 5 minutes, added the spices and cooked for 2 more minutes.

I would recommend putting in your extractor fan and opening a window at this point because it is a stinky business. Next I added the beef and let it colour.

I then added the rest of the ingredients. So that was the coconut milk, lime leaves, sugar, lime juice and soy sauce.

Now for the pressure cooking. I whacked the heat up until everything in the pan was boiling. Then I turned the heat down to medium and put the lid on and let the pressure build up. Once the first whistle went off, I set a timer for 20 minutes. I also kept an eye on how often the whistle kept going off and adjusted the heat so this happened once every 60-120 seconds. Once the 20 minutes was up, I removed the pressure cooker from the heat and allowed the pressure to escape naturally. This took about 15 minutes. I then opened up the pressure cooker.

Beef Rendang is supposed to be really thick so clearly there was way too much liquid. I put the pan back on the heat and let it bubble away for about 20 minutes until the sauce was very thick and shiny.I served this up with some plain boiled rice and some romaine lettuce.

This was quite possibly one of the most delicious things I’ve ever made. The meat was very tender and the sauce was a lovely balance of sweet, spicy and salty. Also looking back at the original recipe, the overall time to make this dish was more than 2 and a half hours. Using the pressure cooker, it took one hour including preparation time!

I was very impressed with my pressure cooker and also the recipe. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, I think this would cook well in a slow cooker and also on the hob as per the original recipe. Pressure cooking does save a lot of time but they are also quite expensive. However if you want your food to taste like it’s been cooking all day but you don’t have the time for it, pressure cooking will do that for you.