Beef Panaeng (Curry)

Recipe taken (and only adapted slightly) from "Fundamentals of Thai Cooking". The panaeng is "perhaps one of the most popular in the Thai repertoire. Salty, sweet and redolent of Thai basil, with the background taste of peanuts, the Curry is enriched with coconut cream..." says the author.

Ingredients:

• 300 g beef skirt steak, cut into short strips (the author recommends beef brisket or cheek, or shank or rib)
• 0.5-0.75 cups coconut cream (see notes on cream below)
• 1.5 cups coconut milk (taken from whole young coconut by piercing a hole and straining)
• 2 tablespoons fish sauce
• vegetables: one Chinese eggplant and ~10 baby carrots chopped into medium pieces
• 3 Kaffir lime leaves, torn
• 3 chilies, cut into strips
• large handful of Thai basil leaves (~30 medium leaves)
• 3 tablespoons good qualities store-bought red curry paste
• 1/4 cup roasted peanuts

Method:
use a mortar and pestle to pound the peanuts into the Curry paste until smooth. "Fry" the Curry paste in the coconut cream for 5-10 minutes. Season with the fish sauce. Stir in the beef and hard vegetables and cook for a couple minutes. Add the coconut milk and bring to a simmer. Add the soft vegetables and simmer until cooked through. Finish with the Kaffir lime leaves, basil leaves, and chilies.

Analysis:

• Forgot to include palm sugar from original recipe; seemed okay without
• cooked the beef in a relatively short amount of time compared to the several hour braising process described in the original recipe. Perhaps this would make the meat less tough than it was in my case.
• I used "young" coconut milk, which is clear instead of milky and has less of a distinctive coconut flavor. The result seemed satisfactory, though.
• There was a slight grainy texture of peanuts in the final product. I should either work the mortar and pestle longer or use creamy peanut butter instead.

Coconut cream:
I tested out the 2 different brands shown below. "Chaokoh" seems to be the biggest seller at the Asian market up in San Mateo. It however, has 4 added chemicals compared to the 1 in the Savoy brand. They both have similar fat content, between 17 and 20%. The Savoy had the problem, paradoxically (since the other one had the emulsifiers), of being totally emulsified/homogenized which makes it impossible to skim the cream off the top for use in the first step of a standard curry-making process.