Recipe: Daging Smoor (Indonesian beef stew with sweet soy sauce)

I am getting so fed up with the ai bot recipes being posted here (and finding out how Facebook, Pinterest and other sites are being flooded with these trash recipes. I will rant about it in another post)...

So I am posting a recipe. Despite not being the type of person who is good at posting recipes. But we can't let the bots win.

Daging Smoor is an Indonesian beef stew with keçap manis (sweet soy sauce), tomatoes and spices (full recipe list below). It's dead easy, but it *is* time consuming (stove top does all the work, though!). I like to make it at the weekend and then pretend there will be enough left over for a second meal during the week.

1kg stewing beef (any kind, really - whatever you like)
3 cloves of garlic (or however many you like - you measure that shit with your heart)
2 onions (yes, in the picture I have three - I was making this recipe x1.5)
2-3 tomatoes (I usually use fresh, but I think a tin of tomatoes should work fine)
5ml / 0.5 tsp nutmeg (I'm tempted to double this next time)
2.5ml / 1/4 tsp ground cloves (also, feel free to make this a bit more - the quantities are from a recipe I copied from the interwebs a long time ago, but I'm thinking it can be a bit more fragrant)
100ml keçap manis (sweet soy sauce - use half soy sauce, half sugar (volume wise) if you don't have access to it)
dash of vinegar
oil for frying
some water

Serves 4-ish?
kcal: about 187 per 100g, or 468 kcal per 250g portion (if serving 4)

1. Cut onions however you like (diced, sliced, finely, coarsely, it doesn't really matter).
2. Fry in oil, low to medium-low heat while you get the garlic ready.
3. Get the garlic ready: garlic press, small grater, fancy knife work, clumsy-thin slices, it doesn't really matter). Add to onion and stir.
4. Add spices. Stir. Make sure the garlic doesn't burn, so turn heat down if necessary.
5. Chop the meat into bite-sized cubes/squares/odd shapes. About 1-2.5cm a side. Whatever. As long as you can fit it into your mouth. Add to pan and stir. Turn heat up a bit.
6. Dice the tomatoes - so, cut them up into shapes that roughly the size of dice, I guess. Add to pan and stir.
7. Add a dash of vinegar, keçap manis and some water. The meat mustn't be submerged, but it should have enough water to cook in. Something like this:

8. Bring to the boil and then turn the heat down. You can add a lid, but you definitely want it to cook the last 1-1.5 hour without a lid, so that the water can evaporate and the sauce becomes thick and beautiful.

How long you cook it for will depend on which cut you used - some are ready after 2 hours, some need 3 or even 4. The packaging / your butcher should be able to advise you.

When it's ready, it will look like this. Now, this is important: soy sauce is very salty, *but* in my experience Indonesian/Malaysian soy sauces (and especially kecap manis) aren't as salty as, say, Japanese soy sauce). So I would suggest tasting about 2/3rds in and adding salt if you want.

Serve with rice or noodles for the starch. (I used a combination of 50/50 wholewheat and white rice.)

For vegetables I like bean sprouts and either green beans or bok choy. I had some beans that were on their last legs, so I used that.

If you're counting calories, the beans are fine if just steamed for 3 minutes or so. But, it's even better when sautéed in a small amount of oil with garlic, and then you add a splash of coconut milk. (Or additionally, substitute the small amount of oil with a larger amount of butter and omit the coconut oil.)