Padang's Culinary

Nasi Padang is eaten all hours of the day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner - it seems every block in this port city is graced with a nasi Padang restaurant advertising its fare in a multi-leveled window display. But all nasi Padang is, of course, not created equal. We found the best version of our Sumatran eat-about at small wooden restaurant painted an eye-catching shade of turquoise, on the edge of the city's tiny Chinatown.

Nasi Padang is an at-your-table, by-the-plate buffet - you pay only for dishes you've eaten from (some establishments allow diners to taste a dish's sauce without charge). Therein lies the pleasure and the pain, the ecstasy and the agony. Diners like us, not lucky enough to be part of a large group, will rarely have the opportunity to partake of all the bounty that any one restaurant offers. (When we have it to do over again, we'll simply decide at the outset to pay for every single dish and sample each without agonizing.)

A typical spread includes dishes that fall into five general categories: rendang (long-simmered, over low heat, in coconut milk, chile, and spices until the coconut oil separates and caramelizes); kalio (similar to rendang, but cooked only long enough for the sauce to partially reduce); panggang (grilled); belado (meat or vegetables spread with chopped, cooked red or green chilies); and gulai (lookalike but individually flavored thin, coconut milk-based stews that have been cooked for only a short amount of time). A deep-fried dish or two and a plainly prepared vegetable are also often part of the selection.

Kacang rendang, a long-cooked coconuty stew of petai ('stink' beans) and small white beans, is a surprise, mostly because I love it even though I've never been a stink bean fan. Here, the stench of the bean is nicely balanced by the heat of chilies and the mellowness of the white beans. Dave's not swayed, so I find myself, for the first time in years of southeast Asian eating, willingly spooning up stink bean after stink bean, until the saucer is clean.

Rendang is one of favourite culinary in Padang. Rendang made from cow meat simmered in spices and coconut milk. You’ll find rendang in Padang restaurants or food stall. There are two kind of rending, dry rendang and kalio (wet rendang). The cooking process of dry rending was longer than wet rendang.

The characteristic of wet rending are its souce more liquid and its color is yellow-brown, not yet brown-black like dry rendang. Rendang have unique characteristic, its taste deliciously oily and salty, sweet, and hot which balanced, and spicier.There are no cooking standard or standard recipes of rendang, so the taste can be differ among food stall or restaurants. The variants of taste depend on condiment and spices which used. Commonly, spices used in rendang recipes are red chili, red onion, garlic, galangal, ginger, turmeric, turmeric leaves, bay leaves, lemongrass, candlenuts, salt, sugar and kandis sour fruit. If you can not mixed spices above, you can buy instant rendang spices in supermarkets.