A few weeks ago I purchased a jar of “Loyd Grossman’s Rendang Sauce”.
I just love Rendang curries and I’m usually happy enough to make the curry sauce from scratch, but it takes time and a lot of not-always-easy-to-find ingrediants, so I bought the jar based on my experience that his other saucse have been good enough.
The recipe uses stewing beef and it cooks for a long time (2–4 hours) so I didn’t even follow the instructions on the jar. I chopped the meet, browned it, added the sause and followed my nose from there on. It’s little tricky to cook because you want to both cook it for a long enough time that the tough meet is tender and you want the sauce to virtually dry-up, so you’ve got to be careful that it doesn’t stick or burn on the bottom of the pan. Accordingly, I had to check it often – i.e. an empirical, evidence-based process.
It worked well. The sause wasn’t fantastic … but it was good enough and I added some more lemon grass and cinnimon, just because I could.
But …
… but, when I finally read the instructions on the jar – just as I was chucking it in the bin – I realised that they were wrong! Very wrong! They said to chop up the stewing beef, fry it until it was brown, then add the sauce and cook for a few minutes extra.
I imagine that there are a few people out there who don’t realise that stewing beef needs to be stewed for hours before it is tender enough to eat. I hate to think of the poor devils out there who’ve bought the sause and only cooked the tough meet for a few minutes. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Tough. Tough. Tough.
Glad i follow an empirical, evidence based process, rather than sticking to the defined-process which was wrong.
