Rendang Jamur (Mushroom Rendang)

I haven't eaten my mother's rendang since I gave up eating red meat two decades ago.

This deeply flavorful Indonesian dish involves slow-cooking beef in coconut milk with herbs and spices (think turmeric, lemongrass, galangal and chiles) until caramelized. It's no wonder that it was voted the world's best food by CNN readers.

Traditionally, rendang is served at selamatan, a communal meal that celebrates a happy occasion like a baby's birth or a wedding. It is also a requisite dish during Lebaran, what Indonesians call Eid al-Fitr.

Similarly, my Indonesian-Chinese mum, Julia, made rendang for special occasions. My two siblings and I grew up in Singapore and, despite living abroad, my mum made it a point to keep us connected to our culture. We spoke our mother tongue at home, we abided by our cultural traditions, and most importantly of all, we ate home-cooked Indonesian food daily.

One of my favorites was rendang, which originated in the Minangkabau region of West Sumatra and has since spread across the Indonesian archipelago. The dish likely evolved from a need to preserve freshly killed buffalo meat in the heat of Indonesia's tropical climate with no refrigeration. It gets its name from merendang, the technique of slow-cooking cubes of meat in spiced coconut milk. After about four hours, the water is removed , leaving a robust oil that cooks the meat until it's quite blackened and dry and infuses it with rich, succulent flavors.

You'll find as many rendang recipes as you'll find cooks. Some versions are brothy like other Southeast Asian curries; others are cooked down until the coconut milk mixture is a thick, redwood-brown gravy. But the most traditional version is a somewhat-dry dish that has been cooked until most of the coconut milk has evaporated and the meat is coated with a very tasty coffee-brown residue called blondo.

As a college student, my mum didn't like the rendang served at restaurants. "It was so dry," she told me. So she started making rendang at home using a cookbook recipe combined with tips from family and friends. And what she created was a winner, beloved by everyone—friends, acquaintances and patrons at her former restaurant alike. And I didn't realize how much I missed it until I went back to Indonesia last summer with her to research my upcoming Indonesian cookbook.

During that trip, I sampled a variety of rendang dishes and discovered that my mum's rendang is quite different from everyone else's. My mum doesn't add the krisik (shredded fresh coconut that's toasted and pounded into a "butter") used as a thickener in many renditions (because she doesn't like it). She stops cooking it when it's still saucy. Plus, her beef and potato combo is definitely not the norm!

But the highlight of my trip was reconnecting with rendang in vegan form.

In Central Java, I met with acclaimed chef Dewi Novita Sari. Dewi and her husband, Dadang Herry Murpiyanto, own Little Garden, a delightful plant-based restaurant set among rice fields in Yogyakarta. Dewi welcomed me into her home kitchen and taught me how to make rendang with oyster mushrooms (rendang jamur). A meatless rendang is not unusual, said Dewi, who learned to cook from her grandmother. In fact, plant-based dishes were very much a part of her childhood diet growing up in a small village on the outskirts of Yogya.

More research revealed that even though buffalo meat was the original choice for rendang, other variants include poultry, ferns, jackfruit, eel, cassava and the most common today, beef.

Except for the main ingredient, Dewi's recipe is similar to what I ate growing up in many ways. When I came home, I used her recipe as a base and incorporated elements from my mum's to create a mushroom rendang recipe all my own. I used to feel a twinge of guilt for not following my mum's recipes to a T. However, I've since realized that there's nothing wrong with taking a traditional recipe off tangent. That's what my mum did. So why can't I?