Photo: christian razukas from Honolulu, Hawaii · CC BY-SA 2.0
Rawon (Black Beef Soup with Keluak)
The black beef soup of East Java. The colour is neither burnt nor soy: it comes from keluak, a fruit that is poisonous raw. It carries cyanogenic compounds, and it only becomes food after being boiled and then buried in ash and banana leaves for weeks, which turns it black, oily and faintly like chocolate. Most cooking that meets a toxin avoids it. This dish eats the part that was the toxin.
Ingredients
- The soup (serves 4)
- beef shin · cut into 3cm cubes700 g
- water2 L
- lemongrass · bruised and tied2 stalks
- lime leaves4
- bay leaves · or Indonesian salam leaves2
- salt2 tsp
- Bumbu (the spice paste)
- keluak · processed only; crack the shell and use the black flesh6
- shallots8
- garlic5 cloves
- ginger3 cm
- galangal3 cm
- fresh turmeric · or 1 tsp ground2 cm
- red chillies · heat is dialled in with sambal3
- candlenuts · or macadamias4
- coriander seed1 tsp
- cooking oil4 tbsp
- To serve
- short bean sprouts · raw, on top100 g
- salted duck eggs · halved2
- sambal2 tbsp
- lime1
- steamed rice4 bowls
Steps
- ⏲ 5 min
Use processed keluak only. What is sold in markets has already been boiled and then buried in ash or earth for weeks, and the flesh should be black, soft and oily. Discard any that is grey, hard, smells bitter, or shows mould. Never use the raw fruit.
- ⏲ 15 min
Crack the shells and scoop out the black flesh. Loosen it in 100ml of warm water for 15 minutes, and keep that black water to go in with it.
- ⏲ 10 min
Grind the shallots, garlic, ginger, galangal, turmeric, chillies, candlenuts and coriander seed to a fine paste. Add the keluak and grind that in too; the whole bumbu turns black.
- ⏲ 10 min
Fry the bumbu in plenty of oil over medium-low heat for 8-10 minutes. It is done when the oil separates back out of the paste and the smell loses its raw edge. Skip this and the soup tastes of earth.
- ⏲ 15 min
Bring the beef and the 2L of water to the boil and skim the first scum off. Add the fried bumbu, the lemongrass, lime leaves and bay.
- ⏲ 120 min
Simmer gently for two hours, until the beef parts under a chopstick. The broth settles to a deep blackish brown.
- ⏲ 5 min
Season with salt now. Keluak brings no salt of its own, only an earthy savouriness, so the seasoning is judged at the end on the finished broth.
- ⏲ 5 min
Serve over rice with raw bean sprouts on top — the short kind, so the hot broth does not cook them limp. Half a salted duck egg, sambal and lime beside it, so each bowl is adjusted at the table.
Tips & Variations
Variations
- Rawon setan: the name used by the famous late-night stalls in Surabaya — "devil's rawon". It is about the opening hours, not the heat.
- Which cut: shin is the default, but ox tongue, tendon and short rib are all common. Shin is chosen for its collagen, which as braising explains turns to gelatin over two hours and gives the broth its body.
- Less keluak: how black it goes is a matter of how many you use. Four gives brown, eight gives something close to squid ink. Below four it stops being this dish.
- There is no substitute. Like the pearl sugar in kanelbulle, keluak cannot be swapped out. Soy sauce or squid ink will give you the colour and none of the earthy savouriness. This recipe stands or falls on having it.
- Other Indonesian dishes here: rendang reduces the same family of bumbu until no liquid is left, while nasi goreng and mie goreng get their colour and sweetness from kecap manis. Gado-gado and satay are the peanut branch.
Tips
- Keluak is poisonous raw, and that is what this page is about. The fruit of Pangium edule carries cyanogenic glycosides and cannot be eaten as it comes. Boiled and then buried in ash and banana leaves for several weeks, those compounds break down, and what is left is the black oily flesh. Only processed nuts are sold; do not attempt the processing, and throw away anything that looks or smells wrong.
- It is the exact opposite move from fufu. Cassava is cyanogenic too, and fufu's answer is to peel it thickly and throw that part away — avoidance. Rawon spends weeks changing the part that was the poison and then eats it. Same problem, opposite solution.
- It is not what fermentation covers. Fermentation there is about dropping the pH so nothing unwanted can live; ageing keluak is not for flavour or for keeping, it is for detoxification. That it also tastes of something is a by-product.
- The bumbu has to be fried. Eight to ten minutes, until the oil separates back out. Raw paste straight into the pot leaves the broth tasting of earth and the spices raw-edged (blooming spices).
- Bean sprouts raw, and last. After two hours of simmering the bowl needs one thing with a bite to it. Short sprouts barely cook in the hot broth and keep their snap — the only uncooked ingredient in the bowl.
- Salt only once the broth is finished, for the reason stocks and broth gives, and here especially because two hours of simmering has reduced the water.
- It is better the next day — though so is that of some thirty-odd pages on this site, so it is hardly this dish's distinguishing feature.
The basics behind this dish
- Blooming Spices: Why Aromatics Go into Fat FirstStir ground spice into liquid and half the aroma never arrives, because most aroma compounds are fat-soluble. The thirty-second window, and the order things go in.
- Stocks and Broths: Clarity, Time, and Why You Do Not Salt ThemWhat separates a clear stock from a cloudy one is temperature, not ingredients. Why you start in cold water, how long each ingredient wants, and why salt comes later.
- Salt: When You Add It Matters More Than How MuchThe same amount of salt either draws water out or seasons all the way through, depending on when it goes in. Osmosis, seasoning in layers, and why salt types are not interchangeable by volume.
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