COCONUT BRAISED BEEF SHORT RIB

Today I’m going to introduce to you one of our signature dishes, which is a coconut braised beef rib. Starting with the coconut oil, and what we’re doing is we’re looking for an enhanced flavor by bringing elements of coconut into the dish.

COCONUT OIL

The Wagu beef ribs have just been cut down into smaller pieces,

WAGU BEEF RIBS

and you’ll see through the beef rib here we’ve got beef bone and we have also the beef. And when we cook this, the flavors from the beef and the bone will integrate with the sauce, creating some richness for us, but at the same time you’ll see the beef shrink and become quite tender, and that will allow us to remove the bone.

We’re just going to add this into the pan, [Lays beef ribs into pan] adding salt and pepper. [Sprinkles on seasonings]

SALT, PEPPER

Turn the heat up a little bit here and we’ll just turn the beef gently. You’ll start to see the caramelization coming in the beef. [Flips with tongs] Just there. And that’s what we’re looking for as the beef starts to cook gently. [Beef browns in pan, moved to bowl with tongs]

So now we’ve removed the beef from the pan, and using the coconut oil, which is already within the pan and the beef fat, which is now rendering down into the pan, we’ll just lower the heat gently. What we’ll do is we’ll start to introduce the flavoring agents. We have our shallots.

SHALLOTS

We’re going to start to cook these slowly just so that they’re soft enough and they start to release their oils, and then we’ll add in our garlic.

GARLIC

Next followed by our ginger.

GINGER

3 stems of Lemon grass, which has been finely sliced.

LEMON GRASS

I’m just going to continuously IND 00:01:41 this off so it becomes nice and soft, and then as we start to add other components into this, you’ll start to see the product changing color. Some people like it hot, some people not so hot.

SLICED CHILI

Me, I like it medium, so we’re going to add in 3 tablespoons of chili. Now this is what we call a banana chili. It’s not too hot, but it gives you a beautiful aromatic and a nice balance. Next we have a star anise.

STAR ANISE

This is a beautiful ingredient, which is coming mostly from southern China. By introducing this into the dish, this will just give us a beautiful balance or anise through the undertone of the sauce.

You’re about to see the ingredients caramelizing on the bottom of the pan here, so that’s given me a little bit of a signal that I need to introduce some palm sugar.

PALM SUGAR

Now the palm sugar is the sweetness in the dish. We’ve grated this today so that it will just melt a little bit more quickly into the sauce. This dish for me is a result of my travels with Emirates through Far East Asia and Southeast Asia. Flavors of Vietnam and Thailand are heavily prominent in this dish. So at this point we’re adding some coriander roots.

CORIANDER ROOTS

We’ll just give this a little bit of a twist. [Twists to break stems] And what this again does is release the essential oils in the herb. Kaffir lime leaves.

KAFFIR LIME LEAVES

These generally come from Thailand and Vietnam and same as the coriander, we just tear them gently into the sauce base. I wish you could be here with me this moment, the smell is fabulous. [Stirs pan] We don’t want to cook the herbs, the coriander root and the lime leaf, too much at this point, because that’s where we want the flavors to come from.

So now that we’ve just caramelized all of the product in the pan, we slowly introduce the beef rib back into the flavor base. I always put the beef meat-side down and the bone facing up. A couple of reasons why. Because I want the meat to cook from the bottom of the pan up, and with the bone at the top, once the bone becomes hot, then we’re getting a much more even cooking surface through the sauce. And all we want is the flavor of the beef to come from the stock in the broth.

BEEF STOCK

I’ve turned that up to a high heat so that it brings the pan to the boil quickly, and then when we introduce the coconut cream, which is cold, that will get a nice balance of medium temperature, and then we’ll turn the temperature down and then we’ll bring it gently back up to the boil so that everything infuses. So as you can see the beef has gently come up to the boil and then we’ll just introduce in slowly this coconut cream.

COCONUT CREAM

You’ll start to see now the sauce is changing color from all of the flavor base which we’ve cooked earlier on. Beautiful caramel color, what we would call a café au lait. I’m just going to introduce some Kecap Manis.

KECAP MANIS

Kecap Manis is a soy sauce, which is coming from Indonesia and it’s a little bit sweeter than the regular soy sauce. It’s produced in the same way and then it’s reduced over a period of time to give it its sweetness and the complexity of a thick syrup which you can see as we add it to the sauce.

This will give us a little bit of added sweetness to the gravy as it cooks. We’ll bring this back to the boil, we’ll cover this with foil, and then we’ll pop it into a 160-degree oven and then we’re going to cook that for about 5 to 8 hours, very very slowly. The result of the cooking slowly will allow the beef to relax in the sauce, the gravy will reduce, and that will be a beautiful eating experience. I’m just going to taste the sauce before we cover it, put it in the oven just to make sure we’ve got the right balance of flavors. [Dips spoon into pan and sips sauce, licks lips] What I’m tasting is the lime leaf, the coriander, the chili which we put in – it’s got a really nice balance of chili, it’s not too spicy and it’s complementing the sauce – and the creaminess from the coconut, and we’ve got the richness coming through from Kecap Manis, the sweet soy sauce. So we’ll cover it with foil, [Covers pan with foil] pop it in the oven and we’ll come back in 8 hours and we’ll be ready to serve it.

Okay, here we are 8 hours later. We have a fabulous smelling beef rib cooked in coconut sauce. [Lifts foil cover] So as you can see, the beef rib has shrunken down somewhat, and that’s what we were talking about before. It started off about that big, and as it’s cooked, it’s shrunk and the muscle fibers have started to break down, and you can see how soft the beef is. I can just pull it apart with chopsticks there. Well we need to taste it to make sure we’ve got the balance right. [Tastes sauce from pan with a spoon] Okay, so we have enough sweetness so I’m not going to add in any more sweet soy sauce. I will add in some fish sauce.

FISH SAUCE

Now a little is a lot, so just go gently. So that’s going to give us the saltiness, so rather than using sea salt, we’re using fish sauce, which will add some richness to the base of what we have here, and then we’ll finish it off with some lime juice which will give us the sourness which we need to balance.

LIME JUICE

So we’ve got the balance right. Sweet, sour, salty. Fish sauce, lime juice and of course the sweetness is coming from Kecap Manis earlier on in the cooking process. So all we’re going to do now is we’re going to take this off the heat and then we’ll do the dishing. [Moves pan aside]

So what we have here is a creamy mashed potato.

CREAMY MASHED POTATO, POTATOES, FRESH CREAM, BUTTER

The potatoes have been cooked gently in a steamer and I like to add butter and cream, but with the butter and cream, I put them into a saucepan, about half a liter of cream and about 500 grams of butter, and I reduce the quantity by 50 percent, and then I add that into the potatoes when they’re going soft through the mashing machine. It’s pretty deluxe, it’s a little bit decadent, but when you’ve taken this long to cook something, you’ll want to enjoy every element of that dish.

This is a broccolini which is a smaller version of broccoli with a longer stem.

BROCCOLINI

We have gai lan, which is a leafy green similar to a broccoli as well but just slightly crunchy.

GAI LAN

And we’ve just sautéed them off in the wok with a little bit of sesame oil and a little bit of ginger and garlic. What we’ll do here is take a nice piece of rib, pop that gently on the top, finish that with the beautiful coconut gravy. [Ladles gravy over plated rib] And just as a little bit of a modern finish, a very very small herb salad is consisting of baby coriander,

BABY CORIANDER

baby basil

BABY BASIL

and baby red basil.

BABY RED BASIL

So there we have a first class plated beef coconut short rib. Please enjoy. [Broccolini, beef, potatoes and herbs on a white plate]

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