Thai Monday Part 7 – Beef Panang

Being a bank holiday today, we took some time to make something for another instalment in the recently neglected Thai Monday series. We chose Beef Panang this time, which is a Thai curry that includes peanuts as well as both coconut milk and coconut cream.

We started by making the paste as usual; this one contained:

Coriander root, salt, dried red chillies (which we de-seeded and soaked), garlic, lemongrass, galangal, red shallots and nutmeg. And peanuts, which weren’t in this picture because we were busy boiling them. These were all ground to a paste, but I think possibly the peanuts weren’t ground quite enough as there were little bits of them in the finished dish.

The finished paste:

The recipe specified stewing beef, which it said to blanch and then simmer in coconut milk for two hours until tender and then slice. So we did. Afterwards, I re-read it and realised that it also said that you could use a more tender cut of beef, slice it thinly and add it at the end to cook through quickly. The latter would have been a much quicker way of doing it, since most of the cooking time for this dish involved waiting for the beef to simmer.

When the beef was cooked and sliced, we heated up some coconut cream until it split, then fried four tablespoons of the paste in it for ten minutes before seasoning with palm sugar and fish sauce. Then we added the beef cooking liquid and the beef itself to warm it through, before adding some deseeded long red chillies, torn lime leaves and torn basil leaves. Served with steamed baby corn and mange tout.

The result was tasty but a bit too sweet, especially for Kerri. We had put in less palm sugar than the recipe specified, but should have reduced it further, knowing that it is usually one of the sweeter Thai curries. It certainly has potential, so one to try again with a few changes – less sugar, bash the peanuts a bit finer, and certainly use the thinly-sliced-beef-at-the-end method rather than the simmer-for-two-hours method.

It did turn out a lovely orange colour though, and with the green of the lime and basil leaves and the red of the chilli, it looked rather a lot like the picture in the book, which doesn’t always happen.