Episode 20: Cantonese Braised Beef

Not all Chinese dishes require a wok. I've been making this recipe for Cantonese Braised Beef with Daikon for a couple years now--almost since the day it was published. The Hong Kong Market on Commerce Street has all the sauces and seasonings needed for it--even Chee Hou sauce, which was somehow elusive in Flushing. Now that I have Chee Hou sauce, of course, I will be trying to find as many excuses as possible to cook with it, rather than have it molder in my refrigerator door.

What I wasn't able to find was boneless beef shank, which was easy to find when I was in spitting distance of an Hmart, but now with the nearest one being a hundred miles away in Burlington, Mass., I needed to work with what the local butchers could offer. If you do a search for "Cantonese Braised Beef" you will find some recipes calling for brisket. I found, however, that it worked just fine with chuck. The key is to get a whole chuck roast and cut it yourself. Make sure when cutting it to leave some of the fat and connective tissues in your chunks--exactly the things that western cooks and butchers usually trim away, but that Chinese cooks value for the resulting textural contrasts.

I usually omit the last step of adding the corn starch slurry. It's a largely cosmetic measure, to gloss up the dish and thicken the sauce. I find that after a long reduction and rendering of the natural fats of the meat, it is plenty glossy and thick without the starch.

Hot Librarian prefers hers served over rice; I do rice on the side, though I have been known to spoon some of the sauce onto the rice. Not the usual Chinese way of eating, I know, but delicious.

While this is a Cantonese dish, variants of braised beef with daikon can be found in many other regions of China. This in spite of the fact that beef is rarely used in everyday Chinese cooking. For example, in Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan cooking, there's a version that includes 6 tablespoons of chili bean paste in the braising liquid. I would love to try it, but with HL and the Little One, I'm outnumbered.