Kare-kare (oxtail and vegetables in peanut sauce)

Beef offal, including oxtail, take such a long time to tenderize that making kare-kare is often considered too work-intensive for an everyday dish. But is that so?

The key to the best kare-kare is to prepare the three components — meat, vegetables and sauce — separately. Breaking down the work also makes the dish more doable even for the not-so-seasoned cooks.

Prepping and cooking oxtail

Although you can use just about any meat for cooking kare-kare, if you want to go the traditional route, then you’ll want beef offal. Whether it’s a mixture of different organ meats or just one variety, remember that when cooking offal, you have to make sure to remove any strong smell.

I do this by parboiling the meat in plenty of water with a little vinegar until the surface of the water is covered with scum. I drain the meat, rinse it well and then transfer it to a slow cooker and add clean water. Won’t the meat smell vinegary? No. You won’t taste nor smell the vinegar at all.

The rinsed oxtail pieces go into the slow cooker. Boiling water is poured in so the cooking commences as soon as you turn on the cooker. To flavor the meat, fish sauce, peppercorns and bay leaves are thrown in.

The best kare-kare sauce

We don’t use pre-mixed powdered sauces at home. I understand the convenience but products like that won’t allow you the opportunity to understand the significance of each ingredient and how they interact with one another until a sauce is formed.

There are three things that make a good kare-kare sauce. The texture, the color and the flavor. To put all that in the sauce, you’ll need a thickener (ground toasted rice), a coloring agent (achiote oil) and, for flavor, the broth in which the oxtail had simmered and peanut butter.

I used to take short cuts by toasting rice flour in an oil-free pan and use it as the thickener for my kare-kare sauce. But I have since discovered that toasting glutinous rice and grinding it into a powder gives kare-kare sauce better texture. The nutty aroma and flavor of the toasted rice is more pronounced too.

To give the sauce its vibrant color, I simply heat annatto seeds in oil. Once the oil has turned a bright red, I scoop out the annatto seeds and discard.

To heighten the nutty aroma and flavor of the ground toasted rice even more, I use it to make a roux. I add the powdered rice to annatto oil and cook them together for a few minutes before pouring in the broth and stirring until the sauce thickens.

Th make sure that the peanut butter dissolves into the sauce, I first stir it with hot broth. When the peanut butter has thinned out and no longer separates from the broth, I add it to the sauce in the pan.

Cook the vegetables in water (or broth), not in the sauce

A common mistake which I used to be guilty of. I used to think that when the sauce was ready, I only needed to dump in the vegetables and let everything simmer merrily until the vegetables were cooked through. In my defense, I thought that the process gave the vegetables more chance to absorb the flavors in the sauce.

But it was really a recipe for disaster. Cooking the vegetables in the sauce means the sauce continued to thicken until the vegetables were done. And that meant being forced to add more liquid to prevent the sauce from scorching.

The better way is to cook the vegetables separately. It takes just one pan, really. Boil water, add salt (or use the broth in which the meat was cooked) and cook the vegetables one by one. Kare-kare requires a mix of vegetables and some need to cook longer than the others. So, to make sure that every vegetable is cooked perfectly, don’t dump them into the pan at the same time.

When you’re done with the meat, sauce and vegetables, you just assemble. Arrange the meat and vegetables in a bowl and pour the sauce over them.