牛肉面 (Taiwanese/Chinese Beef Noodle Soup)

Some good ol' soup

Ingredients

  • Aromatics
    • Ginger
    • Scallions
    • Garlic
  • Sauces
    • 辣豆瓣酱 (spicy bean curd-based sauce)
    • Dark soy sauce
    • Light soy sauce
    • Shaoxing cooking wine
  • Spices
    • Cinnamon stick (not ground cinnamon)
    • Star anise
    • Sichuan peppercorn
    • Bay leaf
    • Fennel seeds (optional)
    • Dried red chili pepper (depending on how spicy you want it)
  • Beef shank. You can also use some beef chuck, but you need a cut with a lot of collagen, which turns into gelatin and adds a ton of flavor to the soup (think how southern BBQ ribs are super soft and melt in your mouth; that’s the gelatin). You definitely, for example, don’t want to use a cut like flank steak or something.
  • Tomatoes (optional, but I like it. If you use tomatoes, you must transfer the soup to a stainless steel pot before adding; notes on this below)
  • Rock sugar (though normal white sugar is also fine)
  • Salt/sugar/MSG

Cooking:

First Step: Cut your beef into large pieces for blanching (if you have beef bone, you can put it in the blanch too): put the meat into a pot of cold water with some ginger slices, sichuan pappercorn, and shaoxing cooking wine. Raise heat until boiling, then simmer for around 5 minutes. Take off heat and wash the meat/bones.

Second Step: Slice your beef into medium-sized cubes (or whatever shape you want). Slice ginger into slices, peel garlic (but don’t mince), and cut scallions into large pieces (separating the scallion whites and greens into different groups). The amount of aromatics per pound of beef is flexible, but for a general guidance, you could use 5 slices of ginger, 5 garlic cloves, and 3 scallions per pound of beef.

Heat up your wok to medium heat until the wok (assuming you are using metal) starts steaming. Put in a generous amount of oil, and then add in the beef/bone. Fry until slightly browned.

Cooking Note: During the initial frying, the beef might release water and it will seem like that it is starting to boil instead of frying. Don’t be tempted to turn up the heat; once this excess water boils off, it will start frying and browning. In general, you don’t want to use high heat here. If you use high heat to fry the meat,the outside will burn quickly (since the water content of the meat is not that high) and the oil will start smoking, which is bad and adds off-flavors.

The goal here is not to achieve a sear, like in steak. In steak, the point is to get an aggressive sear for Maillard browning, while not overcooking the inside of the meat, so you really need high heat to blast the outside of the steak. Here, the goal is to achieve some light browning for flavor, but we are not worried about overcooking the meat. As mentioned in the ingredients list, a principal goal is to break down the collagen in the meat into gelatin, which adds flavor and texture, so in this sense “overcooking” is good.

Second Step Continued: Once the beef is browned enough, add in the ginger, garlic, and scallion whites. Stir fry until fragrant. Then add in the spices and expose them to the oil to bring out their flavor. Again, we are using medium heat, so nothing should be burning or smoking, especially not the spices. After briefly stir frying the spices, add in the 辣豆瓣酱 (spicy bean curd paste). You can add around two tablespoons per pound of beef; more or less depending on your taste. If there is not enough flavor, definitely add some more. Fry this paste at low/medium heat to extract the oils from it (DON’T use high heat otherwise you will burn it before the oil comes out). Once fried a bit, add some dark/light soy sauce around the edge of the wok to caramelize it. Add in a little shaoxing wine along the edges of the wok too. Once everything is fried a bit and the flavors are extracted, add in water until the mixture is covered. You can also add in some beef/chicken stock.

Third Step: Once the water starts boiling, lower the heat so that it’s at a small simmer. You don’t want a roaring boil. Skim off the scum that rises to the top of the soup. After thirty minutes, remove more scum, and remove the aromatics and spices from the soup. This is important; see the post on proper braising technique, but in a nutshell, the aromatics (especially garlic/scallion) will turn to mush and release some off-flavors in the soup.

Simmer for a few hours. You can add in tomatoes at this point, but if you do, you MUST transfer the soup from the carbon steel wok to a stainless steel pot. The reason is that the acidity in the tomatoes will react with the carbon steel and cause the soup to taste metallic. This is important (not a trivial detail). You can also add some tomato in the last 10-15 minutes of simmering for some bright acidity.

Towards the end, add salt/MSG/soy sauce/sugar to tune the soup. See the post on clarity vs. depth to read about how to do this. Note when you tune the soup, there are two dimensions: underspiced vs. too watery. It’s possible that the soup simply needs to be reduced more. If you feel that the soup is not “rich” enough and you can’t taste the beef flavor, then reduce it more before adding at ton of seasoning.

Cooking Notes:

The most important thing is to use medium/low heat when frying the beef/spices/aromatics/sauce. Using high heat will cause things to burn quickly, adding off flavors as the burned parts get added into the soup. Also, be generous when adding the sauce like 辣豆瓣酱 and soy sauce; the worst thing you could do for this soup is under-season it.

Lastly, if you add tomato, you MUST transfer the soup to something non-reactive like stainless steel, otherwise the soup will taste metallic.