Filipino · Main
Kare-Kare
- Advanced
- 3 h
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with toasted, nutty warmth throughout, ferment tang with real depth behind it, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 1kg oxtail (or ox tripe + oxtail, traditional), or beef shank
- 150g peanut butter or ground toasted peanuts
- 3 tbsp toasted ground rice (dry-toast raw rice till gold, grind)
- Banana blossom, long beans, aubergine, bok choy
- Annatto oil; bagoong (fermented shrimp paste), the required partner
The skills inside
FermentationDry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nutsKeeping the cooking liquid
The words inside
Shank, Oxtail & CheekAnnatto (Achiote)Bok Choy
Allergen screen
Found: nuts · peanuts · shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer oxtail 2.5–3 h (or pressure-cook 45 min) until wobbling off the bone; keep the broth. 180 min
- Bloom annatto in oil; whisk in peanut butter and toasted rice with ladles of broth into a thick, orange-gold sauce.
- Return meat; simmer 15 min; add vegetables in order of toughness. 15 min
- Serve with rice and a defiant spoon of bagoong on the side: the dish is seasoned AT the table.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Barrel-aged Chardonnay (Meursault style)
- Also Right
- Champagne
- From the Taps
- Pilsner or witbier
- Zero-Proof
- White grape & tonic
Butter-dressed shellfish climbs a weight class: oak-and-cream Chardonnay matches it richness for richness.
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