Oxtails and peanut butter
May. 1st, 2009 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serenissimaEver since I noticed that the commissary carries oxtails, I've thought about cooking kare-kare, a stew that I enjoyed at my aunt & uncle's house. This week I finally tried it.
As usual when I'm attempting a dish for the first time, I searched for recipes on the Internet. I looked at somewhere around half a dozen recipes. They all had these ingredients in common: oxtails, bok choy, long beans, eggplant, and peanut butter. I'm accustomed to tripe also being an ingredient, but it didn't come up as often as I expected — which is fine with me, I won't touch organ meats. Also, the stew is traditionally thickened with powdered roasted rice, but I was surprised to see how many recipes omitted this. My uncle uses crisp rice cereal (e.g. Rice Krispies) pulverized either in a food processor or by hand in a plastic bag. Here's a little background information on kare-kare, with a recipe.
And here's the recipe I chose to work from. Developed by a Filipino-American man, it has a simplified list of ingredients and, most importantly, does not involve simmering the oxtails on the stove for a long time. Instead, they go into a slow cooker. I ♥ my slow cooker.
Here is how the process went.
Monday night, I opened up my 2 lb. package of oxtails, rinsed them, and put them in my 4-quart slow cooker. I added a palmful of salt and 4 cups of water, and I set the cooker on low. I was a bit concerned over the amount of water, because the author of the recipe says he got 8 cups of broth from his, but I didn't want to add any more water since the cooker was already pretty full. Like the recipe author, I let the meat cook overnight and during the next day. The meat looked cooked by Tuesday morning, but I was expecting the fat and connective tissue to melt/dissolve entirely. This had not happened by morning, although the smell was mouth-watering. It still had not happened by the afternoon: most of the fat had melted, but not all. I wondered if setting the cooker to high would have been any more effective... but 18 hours should be plenty of time for whatever will happen to happen, right? So perhaps the author exaggerated?
I concluded that the oxtails had had enough time, and I removed them from the cooker. The meat did come away from the bones very easily. I tried to separate the remaining fat and connective tissue and set it aside for the dog, to be portioned out over a few meals for him — there was enough of it that I was afraid he might get indigestion if he ate it all at once. The smell was delicious, but the look of that stuff I removed nearly made me gag. By this point I didn't feel like cooking anymore that evening, so I put the meat and the broth in the refrigerator, separately.
I cooked on Thursday evening. The fat in the broth had formed a firm off-white crust about half a centimeter thick. It reminded me a little of ice on a frozen-over pond. I removed the crust of fat and threw it out; underneath, the beef broth had become a gelatinous semi-solid.
I had to use slightly different vegetables: long beans are not available at the commissary, so I got ordinary green beans. They didn't have baby bok choy either, so I used one regular size (adult?) bok choy. And my eggplant was the ordinary Western kind, not the skinny Asian kind, though I think the recipe author also used the Western kind. I used just one, since eggplant is not among my favorite vegetables.
I rinsed and chopped everything before I even turned on the stove. The bok choy in particular had a lot of dirt stuck where the outer stalks joined the base. It seemed a little wilted, so I put the pieces in cold water to try to freshen them a bit, following a suggestion from my uncle. I put the chopped eggplant in salted water in hopes of drawing out the bitterness. I don't know if that really did anything. I think it wasn't bitter to begin with. Between the eggplant, beans, bok choy stalks, and bok choy leaves, separated so I could throw the leaves in last, I was using a lot of containers.
As directed, I sauteed garlic and onions in a pot for a few minutes, then added the broth-jelly, which melted quickly, and peanut butter. This is when I ran into a snag: I only had a cup or less of peanut butter, and it clearly was not enough. Dear Housemate offered to mind the stew while I ran out to the convenience store to buy more peanut butter (after explaining that substituting almonds and a spoonful of sesame oil would not produce the effect I wanted). At the convenience store, I was so distracted that I actually walked out the door and to my car holding the jar of peanut butter before I realized I hadn't paid for it. I rushed back to the cashier, who didn't comment.
I came back to find that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aristeros had gone ahead and added almost all the rest of the ingredients, discovering as he did so that the pot I was using was much too small. His solution was to put the green vegetables in another pot and boil them in chicken broth, since there wasn't enough beef broth, with a little of the oxtail plopped on top for flavor. Only, he had put in the bok choy leaves and not the stems, which turns backwards the whole point of separating the leaves from the stems... and he had dumped in the whole bowl, including the cold water bath, because he didn't know there was water in there.
I added more peanut butter to the pot holding eggplant and meat, found our big stockpot, transferred the raw bok choy and everything else into it, added still more peanut butter, and stirred the mixture. I hadn't realized how much food this recipe makes. It pretty much filled our stockpot, which I think holds 8 quarts. I was so preoccupied with making sure that the green beans and bok choy stalks got cooked and that nothing burned that I didn't taste-test the stew until several minutes had passed. When I did taste it, I realized it was too bland and watery, but by then there wasn't much I could do besides add salt. The vegetables were already beginning to overcook.
So I dished up portions, over rice, as directed. It actually turned out all right. There wasn't much of the oxtail to go round: it seemed to be more an accent ingredient rather than a main player.aristeros sprinkled a little black pepper on top, but I didn't like that flavor combination. We agreed that white pepper might blend better. I knew that the amount of beef broth the oxtail made would not be enough, and we ended up supplementing with 2.5 cans of chicken broth. Next time I would make sure no extra water got in, use more salt, more garlic, and more peanut butter, and maybe increase the proportion of oxtail, or maybe use a different cut of beef. I think the boiled cartilage from the oxtail is supposed to make the broth thicker, but we couldn't really tell the difference from the end result. I might also try thickening with powdered crisp rice cereal. One single-serve breakfast box would yield more than enough.
It's also worth noting that once you get an 8 quart pot full of stew to boil, it continues to cook even after removed from the heat. By the time I went back for another ladle-ful, the vegetables had taken on a definite brownish tinge.
As usual when I'm attempting a dish for the first time, I searched for recipes on the Internet. I looked at somewhere around half a dozen recipes. They all had these ingredients in common: oxtails, bok choy, long beans, eggplant, and peanut butter. I'm accustomed to tripe also being an ingredient, but it didn't come up as often as I expected — which is fine with me, I won't touch organ meats. Also, the stew is traditionally thickened with powdered roasted rice, but I was surprised to see how many recipes omitted this. My uncle uses crisp rice cereal (e.g. Rice Krispies) pulverized either in a food processor or by hand in a plastic bag. Here's a little background information on kare-kare, with a recipe.
And here's the recipe I chose to work from. Developed by a Filipino-American man, it has a simplified list of ingredients and, most importantly, does not involve simmering the oxtails on the stove for a long time. Instead, they go into a slow cooker. I ♥ my slow cooker.
Here is how the process went.
Monday night, I opened up my 2 lb. package of oxtails, rinsed them, and put them in my 4-quart slow cooker. I added a palmful of salt and 4 cups of water, and I set the cooker on low. I was a bit concerned over the amount of water, because the author of the recipe says he got 8 cups of broth from his, but I didn't want to add any more water since the cooker was already pretty full. Like the recipe author, I let the meat cook overnight and during the next day. The meat looked cooked by Tuesday morning, but I was expecting the fat and connective tissue to melt/dissolve entirely. This had not happened by morning, although the smell was mouth-watering. It still had not happened by the afternoon: most of the fat had melted, but not all. I wondered if setting the cooker to high would have been any more effective... but 18 hours should be plenty of time for whatever will happen to happen, right? So perhaps the author exaggerated?
I concluded that the oxtails had had enough time, and I removed them from the cooker. The meat did come away from the bones very easily. I tried to separate the remaining fat and connective tissue and set it aside for the dog, to be portioned out over a few meals for him — there was enough of it that I was afraid he might get indigestion if he ate it all at once. The smell was delicious, but the look of that stuff I removed nearly made me gag. By this point I didn't feel like cooking anymore that evening, so I put the meat and the broth in the refrigerator, separately.
I cooked on Thursday evening. The fat in the broth had formed a firm off-white crust about half a centimeter thick. It reminded me a little of ice on a frozen-over pond. I removed the crust of fat and threw it out; underneath, the beef broth had become a gelatinous semi-solid.
I had to use slightly different vegetables: long beans are not available at the commissary, so I got ordinary green beans. They didn't have baby bok choy either, so I used one regular size (adult?) bok choy. And my eggplant was the ordinary Western kind, not the skinny Asian kind, though I think the recipe author also used the Western kind. I used just one, since eggplant is not among my favorite vegetables.
I rinsed and chopped everything before I even turned on the stove. The bok choy in particular had a lot of dirt stuck where the outer stalks joined the base. It seemed a little wilted, so I put the pieces in cold water to try to freshen them a bit, following a suggestion from my uncle. I put the chopped eggplant in salted water in hopes of drawing out the bitterness. I don't know if that really did anything. I think it wasn't bitter to begin with. Between the eggplant, beans, bok choy stalks, and bok choy leaves, separated so I could throw the leaves in last, I was using a lot of containers.
As directed, I sauteed garlic and onions in a pot for a few minutes, then added the broth-jelly, which melted quickly, and peanut butter. This is when I ran into a snag: I only had a cup or less of peanut butter, and it clearly was not enough. Dear Housemate offered to mind the stew while I ran out to the convenience store to buy more peanut butter (after explaining that substituting almonds and a spoonful of sesame oil would not produce the effect I wanted). At the convenience store, I was so distracted that I actually walked out the door and to my car holding the jar of peanut butter before I realized I hadn't paid for it. I rushed back to the cashier, who didn't comment.
I came back to find that
aristeros had gone ahead and added almost all the rest of the ingredients, discovering as he did so that the pot I was using was much too small. His solution was to put the green vegetables in another pot and boil them in chicken broth, since there wasn't enough beef broth, with a little of the oxtail plopped on top for flavor. Only, he had put in the bok choy leaves and not the stems, which turns backwards the whole point of separating the leaves from the stems... and he had dumped in the whole bowl, including the cold water bath, because he didn't know there was water in there.I added more peanut butter to the pot holding eggplant and meat, found our big stockpot, transferred the raw bok choy and everything else into it, added still more peanut butter, and stirred the mixture. I hadn't realized how much food this recipe makes. It pretty much filled our stockpot, which I think holds 8 quarts. I was so preoccupied with making sure that the green beans and bok choy stalks got cooked and that nothing burned that I didn't taste-test the stew until several minutes had passed. When I did taste it, I realized it was too bland and watery, but by then there wasn't much I could do besides add salt. The vegetables were already beginning to overcook.
So I dished up portions, over rice, as directed. It actually turned out all right. There wasn't much of the oxtail to go round: it seemed to be more an accent ingredient rather than a main player.
aristeros sprinkled a little black pepper on top, but I didn't like that flavor combination. We agreed that white pepper might blend better. I knew that the amount of beef broth the oxtail made would not be enough, and we ended up supplementing with 2.5 cans of chicken broth. Next time I would make sure no extra water got in, use more salt, more garlic, and more peanut butter, and maybe increase the proportion of oxtail, or maybe use a different cut of beef. I think the boiled cartilage from the oxtail is supposed to make the broth thicker, but we couldn't really tell the difference from the end result. I might also try thickening with powdered crisp rice cereal. One single-serve breakfast box would yield more than enough.It's also worth noting that once you get an 8 quart pot full of stew to boil, it continues to cook even after removed from the heat. By the time I went back for another ladle-ful, the vegetables had taken on a definite brownish tinge.
