Name: Bangla Slow-Cooked Beef with Onion
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Bangladesh
Ingredients: One 2-inch piece cinnamon or cassia stick; 1 tablespoon minced ginger or ginger mashed to a paste; 1 tablespoon minced garlic or garlic mashed to a paste; 2 limes, cut into wedges; ½ teaspoon turmeric; 1 teaspoon Bengali Five-Spice Mixture or a scant ¼ teaspoon each black mustard, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, and nigella seeds; 1 pound stewing beef; 4 tablespoons butter or ¼ cup ghee, or 2 tablespoons each mustard oil and vegetable oil; 2 bay leaves; 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice; ½ to 1 cup water; 2 teaspoons ground coriander; 4 green cayenne chiles, sliced into ¼-inch-thick rings; 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste; ½ cup Browned Onions (optional); 1½ to 2 cups thinly sliced onions; About 1 cup loosely packed coriander leaves; 1 teaspoon sugar

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

Mangoes & Curry Leaves

By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Published 2005

About

We haven’t eaten much beef on the Subcontinent, because in Hindu communities there’s no beef around. So it was a delicious surprise to be served beef bhoona, as this dish is called, when I was in Bangladesh. It was accompanied not by plain rice, but by kichuri, a kind of easy pilaf of rice and dal. In a traditional home-style Bangla meal, if you served plain rice with the beef bhoona, you would also serve a simple dal, as well as a gre