Recipe: Daging Masak Hitam (Beef in Black Sauce)

Generally, I don't cook beef much as it's pricey, and most Malaysian recipes require at least 1 kg of fresh beef block. My parents are most gracious to give us beef and bones (especially for Imaan to place in her porridge), so I have a little stock of it at home.

I came home without defrosting anything or buying anything from the market, so I was glad to have some frozen beef. The fastest way to thaw beef is by placing it in a plastic bag and leaving it in a small container of running water.

This recipe was taken and adapted from the awesome Azie Kitchen. Azie calls it Daging Masak Hitam but some may call it Daging Masak Kicap. I have digressed. Try this simple recipe, it's quite easy to make!

Click the 'Read More' link below to view the full recipe!

Daging Masak Hitam (Beef In Black Sauce)

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

300  - 400 gram beef, sliced into medium slices(suitable for 2 portion - I used batang pinang cut)

Some thick soy sauce (Azie uses 1/2 bottle but I reduced it)

Palm sugar/ brown sugar/ sugar

Tamarind juice

Optional: Big red onion, sliced into rings (I didn't add)

Blender together the following ingredients (add water if your blender needs the help):

4 lemongrass stalks

5 dried chilli (adjust based to preferred spice level)

2 inch ginger

1 big Holland onion/ yellow onion

4 candlenuts (for texture, if you can't get it just omit)

4 garlic cloves

Cooking Method

1. Heat some oil in your pan and fry the beef slices - remove the meat from the pan as soon as it turns brown. Azie continues to cook with the beef, but I prefer to remove it from the heat to avoid overcooking the meat.
2. Using the same oil used to fry the meat, add in the ingredients you blended and saute until it cooks - in Bahasa Malaysia, we use the term, naik minyak - which means when the items are sauted perfectly.
3. Add in the soya sauce, tamarind juice, and season with salt and sugar. Be careful not to add too much salt as the soya sauce is already salty. 
4. I add in the beef at the end but it's really up to you!

Frying the beef in Step 1. From the next photo, you can see I have removed the beef after it cooked.

Sauteeing the blended items. Note that the color is not a vibrant red because I used less dried chilli. I will explain why in the next photo.

I have leftover "chili kisar" or dried chilli mix which I had deseeded, boiled, and blended into a paste for other recipes in the fridge, so I added it to the sauted items instead.

After the paste had "naik minyak", I added the beef in the final step.

Added parsley (Italian LOLOL) just for photo purposes, otherwise the dish looks really flat.