Rawon Rice with Dark Beef Soup - Indonesian Food

Rawon rice is a spe­cial dark beef soup cooked with keluak (fruits of kepayang). The spe­cial dark color of  rawon comes from keluak as the main spice. Keluak is a dark brown nut from Indonesia about the size and shape of a flattened golf ball. Before cooking, the content of the nuts is  white in color. Good nuts after cooking, should be richly dark and oily, with the contents variously described as “opium” or “soft tar”. The nuts come from the Pangium edule or “Kepayang” tree, which grows wild in Indonesia.

My mom came from one of the cities in East Java so since I was a kid I have been exposed to this authentic dark beef soup. My mom cooked very delicious Rawon and she always served it warm to eat with steam rice, boiled salted egg, beansprout sambal and shrimp-crackers.

When I arrived back home, I tried to find my mom’s old recipe of Rawon and here is her version of Dark Beef Soup:

Ingre­di­ents:
# 500 g beef
# 1 liter water
# 6 shallots
# Pinch of salt
# 1 roasted tamarind
# 2 teaspoons coriander seeds
# 2 keluaks (fruits of kepayang)
# 1 piece (around1 cm) of turmeric
# 1 piece (around1 cm) of  galangal
# 1 stalk of lemongrass

Direc­tions:
   1. Clean the beef and boil it in the water in a saucepan until almost tender
   2. Remove the beef from the saucepan and cut into small cubes.
   3. Grind all spices except lemongrass and galan­gal then sauté at medium tem­per­a­ture.
   4. Put the spice into the boil­ing beef stock in the saucepan
   5. Add lemongrass and galan­gal
   6. Put back the beef cubes into the saucepan
   7. Cook through until the beef is really tender

To make the Bean Sprouts Sambal

    * Ingredients: 3 red chillies, 5 g of roasted shrimp-paste, pinch of salt and a cup of short beansprout
    * Grind the red chillies, roasted shrimp-paste, and salt, then add the bean sprouts. Mix well

Complement
# Rice
# Sam­bal taoge (bean sprouts sambal)
# Boiled salted eggs
# Fried shrimp crackers