I followed this recipe of beef vindaloo, last night, triple checking everything written there. Since I don't have a spice grinder, I put the chopped onions, chopped tomatoes, salt and spices in a mixie and converted it into a fine paste. Then poured it into a container which had 1kg cleaned beef pieces, poured 250ml of vinegar (the recipe says 250ml for 0.5kg beef, but I felt pouring 500ml for 1kg of beef is too much).
It's been marinated in a fridge overnight. Today morning the beef seems a bit tough when I squeeze it. I thought it's supposed to turn tender.
Anyway, now the recipe asks me to use the marinade for frying the beef a bit. This confuses me.
- How is beef going to get fried (even though there will be 8tbsp of oil), when the marinade contains a good amount of water from the tomatoes and onions?
- Every other recipe I have known, the tomatoes are only added after the frying takes place. I've never known tomatoes being used in marination. Is this really something that works?
- Every other recipe calls for the onions to be fried along with the spices. Is onion really blended into a paste and used for marination?
- Now that I have a rather large quantity of marinade full of onion and tomato, will that ruin the taste of the curry because the onion paste might not actually get fried?
- Should I (instead of trying to fry the marinade), take some fresh onions, chop them up with some ginger and garlic and fry them in oil until golden brown, and take the beef pieces separately and fry it for a while (until the outsides are brown) with the onions, ginger and garlic and later add the entire marinade to make a curry?
Somehow I feel that if I just follow the rest of the recipe on that page, the curry will get messed up.
Best Answer
A couple things to keep in mind -
Using less vinegar in the marinade: is the purpose of the marinade to infuse the beef with flavor and tenderize it? Or is it mainly (or additionally) to apply a coating/paste/sauce to the surface of the beef, that is expected to stay on the meat, to a certain extent? Keep in mind a "tenderized" meat isn't going to semi-dissolve in the marinade when raw as much as the protein structures are going to react a bit differently when cooked. You probably aren't going to be able to tell by touch. A more "liquid" marinade might be more effective in penetrating beyond the surface of the beef and interacting with the meat on the interior. It might be better, not worse, to have a more "liquid" marinade.
"How is the beef going to get fried" - the frying immerses the beef in a very hot substance, and the heat, while reacting more to the surface of the meat, texture-wise, will eventually transfer to the interior of the meat. Let's put it this way - if you didn't use any marinade, at all, how could any meat cook via frying unless it was ground beef disbursed as crumbles? Clearly, the frying process doesn't have to actually touch all parts of the beef to cook it. Similarly, if there is a coating, depending on how well that coating adhere's to the meat, the meat beneath it will still cook, just from all the heat being applied.
Blending the onions obviously infuses the marinade with more of the flavor. It seems like other recipes want minimal onion flavor infused into the marinade, but instead want to use onion as part of the dish, with the onion getting marinade flavor infused into it. Not that I have anything against more onion flavor in marinades, but that doesn't seem to be what they were shooting for with this dish. However, having said that, if don't like pieces of onion and prefer the marinade with more of an onion flavor, then you've stumbled onto a recipe variation that better suits what you like. No rule against that.
Again, I think the tomatoes being added later is more an artifact of the recipe being a mixed meat and vegetable dish, and the desire to have tomatoes, in that form. I think there are probably dishes that use tomato as part of a marinade, and there's no reason not to if you want your meat infused with that flavor, but, again, that is quite different than meat that is infused without it and accompanied by tomatoes. Tomatoes work fine as a marinade component when you want that tomato flavor, though, as Jefromi mentions, often tomato paste is used if that flavor is desired, instead, since fresh or canned tomatoes have so much water content, which dilutes that tomato "flavor."
Sometimes you see variations on dishes that are not traditional or classic takes on dishes, but, rather, what the person posting likes, themselves. As far as "ruining" the dish, if you are after a more classic take, and this is a modified version (think of all the "Americanized" Chinese and Mexican dishes there are out there - perfectly fine..... unless you are craving the original, classical, authentically ethnic style), then it's going to seem "ruined" to you. If you like this take, and it's quite different from the classical style, then it's different, not ruined, because the ultimate measure of "ruined" or not is how it tastes, to you.
Certainly, if you have something in mind, use that to assess, more than the title, whether you want to try that recipe, or create some hybrid of that recipe and another.
When my town rapidly ran out of Chinese eateries that made kung pao exactly as I like it, I had to search. If a recipe had an abundance of hoisin sauce, instead of a little, and did not have Chinese black vinegar in the cooking sauce, I knew that was not what I wanted, so I skipped trying those, regardless of descriptions or relative fame of the sources. Because I knew that was key to whether I liked a version or not.