How to Cook Kare-Kare (The Peanut Sauce Trick Nobody Tells You)

If your kare-kare tastes like peanut butter poured over beef, the problem is that it IS peanut butter poured over beef. Real kare-kare is a peanut AND RICE sauce. Half a cup of plain rice, toasted dry in a pan until it smells like popcorn and ground into powder, is what thickens the sauce and cuts the sweetness — so it turns savory and velvety instead of sticky. Cut the peanut butter back to half a cup and let the rice do the rest. I'm Lorna, Tita Lorna, born in Pampanga and cooking for my family in California for thirty-one years. This is fiesta food, and my mother didn't hand it to me until I was thirty-four. Recipe (feeds 6 to 8): • 3 lb oxtail (ask for the THICK sections), or half oxtail + half beef shank to cut the cost. Pork hocks, tripe or chicken thighs all work. • ½ cup raw rice, toasted dry until golden, then ground to a powder • ½ cup UNSWEETENED peanut butter (or 1 cup toasted ground peanuts) — not the sweetened kind • 2 tbsp annatto (atsuete) seeds steeped in warm oil, then strained — bloom it in OIL, never in water • 1 head garlic + 1 onion · fish sauce · lots of black pepper • 6 to 8 cups of the broth from boiling the meat — never water • Vegetables, cooked SEPARATELY: Chinese eggplant (4–6 min), long string beans (3–5 min), bok choy or pechay (1 min) • Bagoong alamang, sautéed with garlic in oil for 5 minutes, served on the side Method: Boil the oxtail with onion and peppercorns. Skim the grey foam in the first 10 minutes. Simmer gently 2 to 3 hours until a fork twists the meat off the bone. Keep all the broth. Heat the annatto oil, cook garlic and onion, stir in the peanut butter until it smells toasty. Add 6 cups broth and simmer. Mix the toasted rice powder with 1 cup warm broth until smooth, then whisk it in slowly. Never add the dry powder straight to the pot. Cook 5 to 8 minutes until it coats the back of a spoon and a finger line stays open. Season lightly — it should taste slightly under-salted. The bagoong finishes it at the table. Return the meat, rest 10 minutes, then lay the cooked vegetables on top. Do not stir them in. Make it ahead: boil the meat the day before and cool it in its own broth (the fat lifts off hard the next morning). Toast and grind the rice any time, it keeps for weeks. Sauté the bagoong a day early too. Day-of is then about twenty minutes. Leftovers keep 4 days and are better on day two. Reheat slowly with a splash of broth. Freeze it WITHOUT the vegetables, up to 3 months.