The-Unmistakable Flavour of Beef

Beef Yuan Mei

Appears in
top 1000Chinese Gastronomy
Chinese Gastronomy

By Hsiang Ju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin

Published 1957

  • About
While the best flavour of chicken lies in its fat, the best flavour of beef lies in the meat, particularly in the juices. For this reason, the flavour of beef is readily appreciated in rare steak or in stews. In rare meat the juices have not yet solidified, and in stews they are again liquefied. In the overdone steak or the underdone stew the juices are trapped in solids and the meat appears to have no flavour.

The two difficulties in cooking beef are blood and texture. Blood makes stews cloudy, forms scum, and is generally unpleasant to look at. One must suppress its rank and unpalatable taste, and somehow cope with its solids. The Cantonese make a rich, homely beef stew or soup with flank steak and onions (ngao-nam ngao-yok tong) which is frankly thick and cloudy with coagulated beef juices. The flavour is excellent, but the appearance untidy. In the following recipe, wine suppresses the rank taste of blood and also keeps the juices from coagulating in the broth. The proportion of alcohol in the mixture (about 12 per cent) probably effects this by preventing the blood from running out of most of the meat. In the course of cooking most of the alcohol evaporates, a supporting ingredient which removes itself after the job is done. The finished product does not taste of alcohol.