Panang Curry Beef แพนงเนื้อ

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A classic, much loved Thai curry, and a very quick one to cook: panang curry! Instead of being soupy like most other Thai curries, this one is more of a saucy curry with a thick, rich, luscious, flavourful sauce. In this video I also give you a recipe for how to make a "semi-homemade" panang curry paste using store-bought red curry paste as a base.

About Panang Curry:

Panang curry is kind of an interesting dish, because it's quite unique compared to other Thai curries. You may have noticed that most dishes that are classified as "curry" of "gaeng" in Thai cuisine are rather soupy. Lots of sauce, thin and runny sauce, some are even water-based and eat very much like brothy soups like this sour curry or this breast milk boosting curry. (If you have my cookbook, I talk about what is curry in there.)

Panang, on the other hand, might be closer to what you imagine when you think of the word "curry"— a thicker, richer sauce, and just enough of it to coat all the stuff and pool a little. We even have a special word for this amount of liquid in a dish, it's called "kluk klik".  Panang is also unique in that it is all meat—it never has any vegetables added to it. The meat is always thinly sliced, and at most you'll get some red peppers thrown in as garnish.

It's a great weeknight curry because it comes together so fast. The cooking technique is almost more of a stir-fry, which awesome!

How to Ensure Tender Beef

When eating a beef curry or stir-fry, my biggest pet peeve is when the meat is chewy. I hate it. No matter how delicious it is...if the meat it chewy, the dish is ruined in my books. There are a few simple keys to make sure you have tender beef without having to braise it for a long time.

1. Choose a cut of beef that you would eat as a steak. The assumption being that any beef you will eat as a steak is considered "tender", at least compared to cuts you would need to stew or braise. This is a good rule of thumb for choosing stir-fry beef, which this recipe essentially is. I'm using New York strip in this video (it's a particularly fatty one, which was just a lucky pick at the store!).This does NOT mean it has to be an expensive cut, but if you're choosing the less expensive, leaner steaks, the next two points are very important.
2. Slice the meat AGAINST THE GRAIN. If the meat is naturally tender (New York, ribeye, or tenderloin), it's not as big of a deal, but for cuts that are borderline chewy....like flank, or lean sirloin tip, it's very important. You want the shortest meat fibers possible because the longer it is, the harder it is to chew. Think of slicing the beef as "pre-chewing"—let the knife do the hard work for you. So pay attention to your steak, look at which direction the meat grain runs, and slice across it. See my video for an example.
3. Slice meat THINLY. For 2 reasons, one is because the thinner the beef the more tender is it to chew, which is important if you're using leaner, less tender meat. The other reason is that this is a quick-cooking curry, not a long simmering one, so if the meat is thick the flavour will not have time to penetrate the inside. Using meat that is still a little frozen inside makes slicing thinly much easier.

Watch The Full Video Tutorial!

All my recipes come with step-by-step video tutorials with extra tips not mentioned in the blog post, so make sure you watch the video below to ensure success - and if you enjoy the show, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. Thank you!

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