Vietnamese beef stew, deconstructed

I must warn you that this is a deconstructed recipe. I did find a recipe for beef stew in one of the three Vietnamese cookbooks that I have but I felt that the list of spices was kind of “blonde.” It happens when you have Westerners cooking their version of Asian dishes and they are not that familiar with indigenous spices. So, what I did was to add more spices according to how my taste buds interpreted the ingredients in Pho Hoa’s beef stew. It’s a pretty simple recipe, really, and it’s the combination of spices that can be quite intimidating rather than the cooking procedure itself. But if you can get over the prejudice against the pungent spices, the cooked dish is just wonderful.

This recipe serves 6 to 8.

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