What Do You Say? Kansi!
Filipino cuisine never ceases to amaze me. Just recently I have come upon something else wonderfully tasteful from a friend’s kitchen in Cagayan de Oro. It is called “kansi.”
“Kansi” is something like a soured beef stew. Everyone who has tried the dish only has superlatives to describe it. I challenge anyone who has tasted it to say he or she does not like it.
Right the next day after I first tasted taste “kansi,” I started asking around about it. My friend would not tell me; she did not know. It was an old woman from a neighboring upland town who cooked it for her on the day of my visit, and the woman had already gone home.
Luckily, two days ago I found a “kansi” recipe at the website http://ltdanskitchen.blogspot.com. The recipe was very doable. The only hurdle, though, was finding a particular ingredient that seemed to be the thing that gives “kansi” its unique taste.
As a native of Dumaguete who has long been residing in Cebu, I had not heard of a fruit called batwan before. The fruit was the souring agent for “kansi,” whose sourness would closely resemble that of the “sinigang” of the Tagalogs. Batwan was, for me, hard to find in Cebu.
Batwan is not very common, especially now that there are synthetic souring agents widely available in small packets at supermarkets. But someone tells me that every once in a while, the sour fruit can be found in the city’s Carbon Market, although not in abundance. If not, some backyards somewhere around probably have the plant itself.
In “kansi,” batwan is used instead of the tamarind fruit. The sourness of the resulting stew is milder.
I couldn’t wait to try cooking “kansi,” so I just settled for a powder souring agent. The rest of the ingredients I followed faithfully as listed at http://ltdanskitchen.blogspot.com. My tweaked version tasted okay – but not as good as the one I tasted in Cagayan de Oro where batwan fruit was used. The http://ltdanskitchen.blogspot.com original recipe is as follows:
Kansi
Ingredients:
4 lbs beef shanks
2 onions, diced
6 to 8 garlic cloves, minced
4 stalks of lemon grass, tied into a bundle 1 inch fresh ginger, peeled and sliced 6 cups beef broth
2 lbs fresh batwan fruit
2 lbs unripe jackfruit, sliced
2 Asian chili peppers salt and pepper
2 tbsp brown sugar
4 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp annatto seeds + 4 tbsp vegetable oil
Procedure:
1. In a large pot, boil the beef in enough water to cover. Season with a tablespoon of salt and cook until the beef has released most of the debris from the bones. Remove the beef pieces and wash with water. Set aside. Pour the broth into a large pot through a sieve.
2. In another large pot, heat the vegetable oil over medium high heat and sauté the garlic and onions. Season with salt and pepper and cook until tender. Return the meat pieces and brown. Add the ginger and the lemon grass and pour in the beef broth.
3. Add enough of the boiling broth to cover the meat and bring back to a boil. Once boiling, lower the heat to medium low and simmer covered for 2 hours or until the beef is more tender.
4. Set aside the pot of beef and ladle about 4 cups of the broth into a small pot. Add the batwan and cook until softened. Once softened, mash with a fork or potato masher and pour the liquid back into the large pot over a sieve. Add more broth if necessary to extract all of the soured broth and pulp from the batwan. Check for flavor and add the sugar (if preferred) to balance the sourness.
5. Return the big pot into the flame and add the jackfruit and the peppers. Cook uncovered until the jackfruit is cooked. Check for seasoning and adjust with salt and pepper.
6. In a small pan, extract the annatto oil by frying the annatto seed in the vegetable oil over low flame. Cook for 2 minutes and set aside.
7. To finish the dish, add the annatto oil into the stew and serve steaming hot with steamed white rice.