A spice blend to make all your rendang dreams come true! If you've had rendang (pronounced rehn-da:hng) at a good Malaysian restaurant and can't stop dreaming about it, this spice blend is for you. We heartily disagree with the common misconception that rendang is "a rich, thick curry". While the two have some ingredients in common, they are not the same. This spice blend is authentic to Minangkabau-style rendang, which was brought over to Malaysia by migrating Indonesians in the 1400s. The Minangkabau people settled primarily in Negeri Sembilan (Auria's home state), and have upheld their distinct cooking traditions over the centuries.
So! You have a bag of delicately blended spices and aromatics for an authentic rendang. Now what? Sure, the bag gives you directions, but we were extremely limited by the available space on the pouch and couldn't give you all the details related to making a brilliant pot of rendang. Below are the finer points on how best to use this spice blend for the best at-home rendang experience possible.
Beef rendang is what my Mum usually made for special occasions and big parties. She didn't cook outdoors a lot, but rendang is the one dish she ALWAYS cooked outside, in a large wok set on a charcoal stove. To me, those outdoor rendang cooking days were always an adventure. When I was young, all I knew was that she combined a bunch of ingredients in the wok, fiddled with the fire to make sure it burned evenly for hours and the resulting dish of gloriously-flavored, melt-in-the-mouth beef was pure MAGIC. As I got older, she taught me how to watch over the rendang so she could take a nap in the early afternoon while it cooked - it was my job to keep watch of the fire, add charcoal, fan the flames, and most importantly, scrape the bottom of the wok regularly to make sure it didn't burn! Just before I left home to come to the US, she sat down and wrote out the recipe. Here's the method, in her own handwriting:
