So this was a dish that I was really looking forward to making as soon as I saw it in the cook book. This is a braised beef cheek served in a Thai Curry sauce. I was definitely not disappointed in this dish.
So, beef cheeks don't exactly show up in your butcher's case very often, so I first turned to the internet and I successfully found a couple places online that would ship them to me. Then I remembered that there's a locker here in town that does custom processing of beef and hogs a few times a week, surely they'd be able to save me a cheek off of one of the cows, no such luck, but they did steer me to a locker in a small town about 20 miles away that would sell me some. I placed my order and five days later, I had my 20 ounce beef cheek all for $5 and an hour of my time. What a steal.
So the first step was to cure the cheek, the cure was a mixture of salt and sugar that was spiked with nutmeg, coriander, dried Thai chiles, lemongrass, garlic and ginger.
The salt and sugar went together. The rest of the ingredients went into a food processor until they formed a paste and then they were mixed in with the salt and sugar. The beef cheek went into a pan and then was crusted with everything. Then the whole mixture went into the fridge.
This is what the beef looked like after curing.
A component of this dish was the penang curry paste. This paste was used to flavor the beef during its long cooking process as well as the base for the penang curry sauce that the beef was served in. The paste included peanuts, salt, cilantro root, water, lemongrass, galangal, ginger, shallots and dried Thai chiles. All the ingredients went into a food processor and were combined.
So the paste was done and it along with the beef went into a vacuum bag and into 194 degree water to cook sous vide, scheduled for four hours, I let it cook 4 1/2 hours and it probably should have been 5 or 5 1/2.
While the beef cooked I dealt with probably my least favorite ingredient in the kitchen, the coconut. These effers are a pain in the ass to open for so little pay off in flavor and deliciousness. I needed the water on the inside and flesh to juice. Thankfully the cookbook provided a trick to get additional juice out of the coconut after you've run the flesh through a commercial juicer once. Well since I don't have a juicer and don't plan on buying one I used the trick for the first level of juice.
Time to make the curry sauce. This included, coconut juice, palm sugar, coconut water, fish sauce, the chilled fat from the beef cheek, thai chiles, kaffir lime, the reserved paste and shrimp paste. If you're noticing a pattern there is a lot of chiles in this dish. This was about the time I realized the same thing and how spicy this dish really was going to be.
So rather than oil I heated up the beef fat from cooking the cheek as the oil for this and then added the paste and cooked it until brown.
Then the palm sugar went in until everything had carmelized.
Then the rest of the ingredient went in and cooked for about 20 minutes.
Garnish time, bell peppers a little bit of red yellow and greens.
The next garnish was baby corn, so this menu actually ran during the summer in Illinois which made fresh corn easy to come by and ironically enough, the recipe specifically states that canned isn't really acceptable, but what the hell does Grant Achatz know.
I sauteed them up in some grapeseed oil until just charred.
As a final garnish, I took fresh Thai chiles and took them for a spin with grapeseed oil, as if this dish needed more spice.
Here's everything I needed to put the dish together, the beef, the curry sauce, the chili oil, bell peppers, lime juice, fried basil, sweet corn and a lettuce leaf.
The final plate, everything about this was delicious. I made the mistake of making this as sort of an appetizer when I had another dish on the menu for dinner. But this dish had everything a Thai dish should have, sweet, spicy, sour everything. I can't wait to make this for my brother and his family to see what they think of it.
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