How to Make New York's Most Famous Coconut Beef Curry at Home | Zainab Shah | NYT Cooking

I love when the smoke comes out like that. I feel like a mad scientist. Hi, I'm Zainab. I'm a recipe developer and a home cook. I love to cook. I love to eat. I'm at the New York Times cooking studio kitchen today. Really excited to be making coconut beef curry. It's truly one of those complex, deeply flavorful dishes. Really spicy. I learned how to make this from Chef Vijay Kumar of SEMA in New York City. A Michelin-starred talent. My version is kind of the CliffsNotes version of it. It's just as good, but it saves a lot of time. Every step and every ingredient results in this really beautiful, really delicious end final result, which is truly more than the sum of all its parts. So we are ready to toast our spices. It's a really fun part of the process because the kitchen smells really good when you're doing this. When I did this with Chef Vijay Kumar, he toasted his spices for 15 minutes. I'm not going to toast these spices for 15 minutes because I don't have that level of skill. I'm going to toast the spices for maybe five minutes and that's going to bring out just enough flavor for us for the curry. We want to make sure that the pan is really hot. So if we start feeling like the spices are burning, we'll just add our fresh ingredients and we'll lower the heat a little bit. You can shake the pan. You can use a spoon if you prefer. The way to know that your spices are toasting is they'll darken in color and they'll give you this really beautiful aroma and that really coaxes flavor out of the whole spices and lets them bloom. Shake it. Fresh ingredients, that's going to lower the temperature of the pan and you might want to play with the heat a little bit as well. Typically in this recipe, it's fresh desiccated coconut, but in the absence of that, we can use dried coconut. I've lowered the heat significantly. The color of the spices has darkened. It smells amazing. It's done. We are ready to blend them into a paste. I'm going to add half a cup of water, but we might need more. We'll see. We want it to have a bit of a smooth consistency, so you might need a little bit more water depending on what your spices are like, but we can make it a little bit smoother. It smells like there are parts of my nasal passage that are opening up from just smelling it. We can see that this is less grainy. It can be smoother if you want, but this will do the trick. We are ready to cook the beef. We'll start by heating the sesame oil on high for about 30 seconds and the way you can tell that the oil is ready for the mustard seeds is it'll thin out slightly and you might see like a shimmer on top, like a mirage in the desert, and that's how we know. Let it splutter for a few seconds and then we can add the ginger and garlic paste. The way to know when the ginger and garlic paste is done, there'll be a raw smell in the air when you first put it in and then that raw smell kind of dissipates, so you know that it's ready for the next step, which is the onions. My eyes, my eyes. And now we're just going to saute the onions on medium for about five or seven minutes till they change color and start becoming transparent. At this point, if you put a pinch of salt, it'll help the onions cook faster. Okay, we're ready for our ground spices and we want to add these on low heat because these burn pretty quickly and if you see that it's sticking to the bottom of the pot, you can just add a splash of water. I spent about 30 seconds on the heat with that and now I'm going to add the tomatoes. And now we're going to cook the tomatoes for 10 minutes and we'll know that they're done when they fully break down and get mixed up with all the other ingredients in the pot. I like to smash the tomatoes because again, that's like me with my lack of patience. Helps them break down quicker. If we see that a lot of this stuff is sticking to the bottom of the pot, doesn't hurt to add water. There's no limit to how much water you can add as you're cooking. It just aids in the cooking process. And now we can add the beef. I'm going to make sure that the beef is fully coated with the tomato-onion spice mix before I do the next step just so that it sticks a little bit to the meat. Beef chuck works particularly well for this recipe just because of the marbling and how it holds up during the cooking process. Now that the tomato-onion spice mix has coated the beef and we've cooked it down a little bit, add the paste and the water. We're going to lower the heat and simmer the beef for about 40 minutes and the liquid in the pot will reduce by half by that point. We're about to open the lid and the liquid we can see has reduced by half. We'll add the potatoes at this point and about half the coconut milk. I'm gonna turn the heat up to high so that it starts boiling and then reduce it to a simmer. Put the lid back on, let it cook for 20 minutes. Ooh, looks delicious. The oil has also separated, you can see it come to the surface. This is a good point at which you want to taste it. Mm, I think it needs a little bit of salt. Also see if the potato's done. All right, that's cooked. Now that we know that the beef and potato are done, we can add the coconut milk which is going to lower the temperature of the pot and stop the whole dish from cooking. Because the curry is so heavily spiced, coconut milk adds balance and just a tiny bit of sweetness. I'm gonna bring the heat up to high for a few minutes and then we're done. Wow, this looks amazing, I could eat this right now. This is the best part. My favorite way to eat it is with paratha because it's robust enough to stand the curry and it adds a really comforting element to an already comforting dish. That's delicious. It's heavily spiced but at the same time you can taste a little bit of the coconut as well. Really delicious, fantastic recipe that you can make at any time. It does have a few involved steps and it has some extensive ingredients. That said, you might find yourself a little extra time and go for it because of how comforting and complex the flavors are and the way it makes your house smell. It's absolutely delicious. For this recipe and other recipes, go to newyorktimescooking.com or click on the link below.