Review of the Beef Pasanda Recipe
Hi, Ray here again.
This week I decided that I wanted to try a recipe for a dish that I’ve never eaten before. I searched thru the great recipes on the Curry Focus website and chose the Beef Pasanda.
The beef had to be marinates overnight and so I made sure that I got all of the ingredients in plenty of time.
The marinade is simply half a bottle red wine. Here I had a difficult decision to make. I didn’t want to buy an expensive bottle of wine just for cooking (I know that is probably the wrong decision to make) but I didn’t want to buy cheap and nasty wine either (because there would be a couple of glasses left over to drink). I eventually went for an average merlot.
I have to say that this is easily the noisiest curry that I’ve ever made. I don’t have a meat tenderizer and so I ended up putting the beef onto the kitchen work surface, covering it with a plastic meat preparation board and pounding the board with a hammer. I made a lot of noise but the beef was flattened just fine.
I put the marinading beef into the fridge overnight.
The next afternoon, I started to make the Pasanda.
I prepared the onions, garlic and ginger and stir-fried them for 10 minutes. The mixture gets very dry so needs to be kept moving at all times. There was a lovely aroma from the ginger when the cooking stopped.
I mixed up the spicy paste whilst the onion mixture was cooling.
After a while I put the onion mixture, along with the cilantro and coconut, into the food processor and made a puree.
After that the spicy paste was stir-fried for 90 seconds to be joined by the puree to be stir-fried for 5 minutes.
I mixed in the ground almonds and tomato paste and then removed the mixture from the heat.
The oven had already preheated and the beef, marinade and cooked ingredients all went into a large casserole. After mixing everything well, the casserole went into the oven.
I checked and stirred after the 30 minutes and cooked it for another 30 minutes.
I checked the Pasanda once again and all was good.
I returned the Pasanda to the oven whilst the rice was started.
After a five minutes I turned off the oven, leaving the Pasanda to cook for another 10 minutes.
The pasanda was served up to the waiting dinner guests.
The sauce was rich, thick, smooth, nutty and tasted of the red wine. And the beef was very tender. The Pasanda was eaten quickly enough but failed to ignite much enthusiasm. One of the guests commented that it would have been better with some yogurt. I did a quick search on the internet and most of the Pasanda recipes did indeed use yogurt for the marinade. So I need to find another Pasanda recipe to try. One of the guests was looking for some red wine to go with the food but I had already drunk the remainder of the wine whilst cooking – it’s thirsty work in the kitchen and the wine is a valid cook’s bonus.
Overall, the Pasanda was very tasty and scored 7 out of 10 with a heat rating of mild.
If you like a mild curry and red wine then this could be just the curry for you.
