Kare-Kare.
Filipino Oxtail Peanut Stew
Kare-kare · say it: KAH-reh KAH-reh
Kare-kare is a slow stew of oxtail and tripe in a thick, mild peanut sauce coloured with annatto and thickened with toasted ground rice, packed with eggplant, long beans and banana blossom. Tasted on its own it is nutty, faintly sweet and noticeably underseasoned — that is intentional. The salt arrives at the table as bagoong, fermented shrimp paste, stirred into each portion by the person eating it. Get that pairing right and the dish snaps into focus: rich and rounded from the sauce, sharp and funky from the bagoong, with oxtail so soft it slides off the bone. It takes most of an afternoon and almost none of it is active work.
- Gate
- PhilippinesPampanga
- Prep
- 40 min
- Cook
- 3 hr 30 min
- Total time
- 4 hr 10 min
- Serves
- 6
- Status
- Takes skill
- Nutrition / serving · estimated
- Calories 720 kcal
- Protein 44 g
- Carbs 24 g
- Fat 51 g
- Fiber 6 g
- Sugar 6 g
- Sodium 620 mg
Why this recipe works.
- Toasted rice and freshly ground toasted peanuts, not just peanut butter, so the sauce has real texture and a roasted depth.
- Keeps the sauce deliberately unsalted the way it is actually served, and explains why the bagoong is not optional.
- Handles the tripe properly with a separate pre-boil, so it turns tender without dragging its smell into the stew.
- The vegetables are blanched separately and laid on at the end, so they stay bright instead of dissolving into the sauce.
Ingredients.
16 itemsMeat
Sauce
Vegetables
To serve
Equipment
- Large heavy pot or Dutch oven
- Dry skillet for toasting
- Spice grinder or food processor
- Fine sieve
Instructions.
Boil the tripe separately
Cover the tripe with cold water in its own pot, bring to the boil, drain and rinse. Refill with fresh water, add one bay leaf and simmer for 90 minutes until a knife passes through with no resistance, then drain and cut into strips.
Tip This blanch-and-reboil is what keeps the finished stew clean-tasting rather than gamey.
Simmer the oxtail
Put the oxtail in a large pot with the remaining bay leaves and peppercorns, cover with 2.5 litres of cold water and bring to a bare simmer. Skim the foam thoroughly for the first 15 minutes, then cook uncovered for 3 hours until the meat pulls away from the bone at a touch.
Tip Keep the surface barely trembling. A boil makes the broth cloudy and the meat stringy.
Strain and reserve
Lift the oxtail out and strain the broth through a fine sieve, keeping about 1.2 litres. Let it settle for a few minutes and skim the fat from the top, saving 2 tablespoons of it for the sauce.
Toast the peanuts and rice
In a dry skillet over medium heat, toast the peanuts for about 8 minutes until deep gold and fragrant, then set aside. Toast the raw rice in the same pan until the grains turn the colour of weak tea and smell like popcorn. Grind both, separately, to a fine powder.
Tip Grind while still warm — the peanuts release their oil and the powder turns almost pasty, which is exactly what you want.
Make annatto oil
Warm the neutral oil in a small pan over low heat, add the annatto seeds and steep for 3–4 minutes until the oil is a strong sunset orange. Strain out and discard the seeds.
Tip If the oil starts smoking or the seeds darken, pull it off immediately — overheated annatto turns bitter and muddy brown.
Build the sauce
Heat the annatto oil and reserved beef fat in a wide heavy pot, soften the onion for 5 minutes until translucent, then add the garlic and cook another minute until fragrant. Pour in the reserved broth and bring to a simmer.
Thicken with peanut and rice
Whisk in the ground peanuts and toasted rice powder a little at a time so no lumps form, then simmer gently for 15 minutes, stirring often, until the sauce coats a spoon thickly and a spatula leaves a brief trail across the bottom of the pot.
Tip Keep it at a whisper of a simmer. A hard boil splits the peanut oil out and turns the sauce grainy.
Return the meat
Slide the oxtail and tripe into the sauce and warm through for 10 minutes so the meat takes on colour and flavour. Taste — it should be nutty and mild. Add the fish sauce only if it is truly flat, and stop well short of properly seasoned.
Blanch the vegetables
Blanch the long beans for 3 minutes, the eggplant for 3 and the pechay for 1 in salted water, dropping each into ice water as it comes out. Squeeze the banana blossom dry and blanch it for 2 minutes to remove its astringency.
Assemble and serve
Arrange the drained vegetables over the meat in the pot, spoon a little sauce across them and bring it to the table without stirring them in. Serve with rice and a bowl of sautéed bagoong for each person to stir into their own plate.
Tips from our kitchen.
- Boil the tripe separately in fresh water with a bay leaf before it joins the stew. Cooking it in the main pot from the start gives the whole dish a barnyard edge.
- Toast the raw peanuts and the rice until they smell like popcorn and biscuit — grind them while warm and the sauce gains a depth peanut butter alone cannot reach.
- Do not salt the sauce. Season only with a little fish sauce if it is genuinely bland, and leave the rest to the bagoong at the table.
- Skim the fat that rises from the oxtail and reserve it — a spoonful stirred back into the finished sauce gives the glossy sheen restaurants get.
- Steep the annatto seeds in warm oil rather than boiling them; over 5 minutes at high heat they turn bitter and the colour goes brown instead of orange.
- Blanch the vegetables in salted water and drop them into ice water. Cooked in the sauce they go grey and leach starch into it.
Substitutions.
- Oxtail → Beef shank in thick cross-cut slices, or beef short ribs
- Shank gives similar collagen and marrow at a lower price. Whatever you use must have connective tissue — lean stewing beef makes a dry, disappointing kare-kare.
- Tripe → Leave it out, or use extra oxtail
- Tripe is traditional but far from universal; plenty of households make oxtail-only kare-kare. Nothing else in the dish depends on it.
- Ground toasted peanuts → 200 g natural unsweetened peanut butter
- Standard practice in Filipino home kitchens. Use the kind with nothing but peanuts in it — sweetened peanut butter makes the sauce cloying.
- Banana blossom (puso ng saging) → Extra long beans, or quartered baby bok choy
- Banana blossom adds a slightly astringent bite that cuts the peanut richness. Canned hearts of palm are the closest widely available stand-in.
- Annatto seeds → 1 tsp achiote powder or 1 tsp sweet paprika
- Colour only — annatto contributes almost no flavour at this quantity. Paprika shifts the shade slightly warmer but nobody will object.
Variations.
- Kare-kareng pata
- Made with pork hocks instead of oxtail. Cheaper, faster by an hour, and the skin gives the sauce a comparable body once it softens.
- Seafood kare-kare
- A restaurant favourite: prawns, mussels, squid and crab in the same peanut sauce. Cook the sauce fully first, then poach the seafood in it for a few minutes.
- Vegetarian kare-kare
- Built on fried tofu, banana blossom and the full vegetable set. Genuinely good — but you lose the bagoong, so season the sauce with miso or salted fermented black beans instead.
Storage & reheating.
Kare-kare keeps 3 days refrigerated and reheats better than most stews, though the sauce thickens considerably as the rice starch sets — loosen it with beef stock or water over low heat, stirring so the peanut does not catch. Store the blanched vegetables separately and add them fresh on reheating, since they go soft and dull sitting in the sauce. It freezes for 2 months; freeze meat and sauce only.
Serve with
Steamed rice and a dish of sautéed bagoong alamang — the salt of the meal lives there, not in the pot.
The story behind Kare-Kare.
Nobody can settle where kare-kare came from, and the theories are all plausible enough to survive. One line traces it to Pampanga, the province that treats itself as the country's culinary capital and claims the dish outright. Another connects it to Indian sepoys who were stationed near Manila during the brief British occupation of the city in the 1760s and are said to have settled in Cainta, Rizal — the name supposedly a corruption of curry, the annatto standing in for turmeric. A third argument holds that it is simply a Filipino elaboration of the region's many peanut sauces, with the doubled syllable being ordinary Tagalog wordplay rather than a loanword. There is no document that resolves it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing confidently.
What is not in doubt is its status. Kare-kare is fiesta food, the dish that appears at baptisms, town celebrations and Sunday lunches with extended family, precisely because it takes three or four hours and feeds a crowd. It is expensive by everyday standards — oxtail is not cheap anywhere — and labour-intensive in a way that signals the occasion matters. The traditional service is in a palayok, an earthenware pot, with the vegetables arranged on top of the meat rather than stirred through.
The unsalted sauce confuses first-timers constantly, and it is the most important thing to understand about the dish. Kare-kare is built as one half of a pair; bagoong alamang, the pink-brown fermented shrimp paste sautéed with garlic and a little sugar, is the other. Diners take a spoonful onto the rim of their plate and mix it in bite by bite, controlling the salt and the funk themselves. Season the pot instead and you have made a perfectly nice peanut stew, but you have not made kare-kare.
Questions, answered.
Why does kare-kare taste bland on its own?
Because it is meant to. The sauce is cooked with little or no salt, and the seasoning is supplied at the table by bagoong alamang, a salty fermented shrimp paste that each diner stirs into their own portion. Eating kare-kare without it is like eating unsalted food and concluding the recipe failed.
What is bagoong and is there a substitute?
Bagoong alamang is Filipino shrimp paste made from tiny fermented shrimp, usually sautéed with garlic, onion and a little sugar before serving. Any Southeast Asian fermented shrimp paste works if you sauté it first. Failing that, use a salty miso or anchovy paste thinned with a little vinegar — the funk will be different, but the role is filled.
Why is my sauce grainy or split?
Usually the heat was too high after the peanuts went in. Ground peanut and toasted rice thicken by suspension, not emulsion, and a hard boil drives the oil out. Keep it at a bare simmer, stir often once the sauce thickens, and whisk in a ladle of hot broth to bring a split sauce back together.
Can I make kare-kare in a pressure cooker?
Yes, and it saves two hours. Pressure-cook the oxtail with the aromatics and water for 45 minutes at high pressure, release naturally, then strain the broth and build the peanut sauce in a wide pan as written. The tripe can go in with the oxtail for the same time.
How far ahead can I make it?
The meat and sauce can be made two days ahead and actually improve, since the oxtail keeps absorbing the peanut flavour. Blanch the vegetables on the day and add them only when you reheat. If the sauce has set stiff in the fridge, thin it with hot stock rather than water so you do not dilute the flavour.
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Recipe by The DishRoute Kitchen · published August 20, 2026 · updated August 20, 2026