Named the “best food in the world” by not one but two CNN reader polls, this richly flavoured Indonesian dish, originally from Western Sumatra, and also popular in Malaysia and Singapore, is most commonly made with beef. That’s not to say that the chicken version is second best, however – and, as Mandy Yin, chef and proprietor of London’s Sambal Shiok and author of an excellent Malaysian cookbook of the same name, points out, it’s also considerably quicker to make.
This shorter cooking time means that chicken rendang retains more of what the legendary Sumatran-born writer Sri Owen describes as its “luscious, coconut-based sauce”, leading her to suggest, in her classic book Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, that it might more properly be known as a kalio, a wetter dish than the traditional dry rendang, which was originally a preservation technique as much as a recipe. Though there are many regional variations, fans of the bovine variety will be relieved to hear that the flavours – sweet and spicy – are similar … but you can have this one on the table in an hour and a half, which is, I promise you, a very good thing.
