Tasty source of meat, drink and snacks

By Ye Jun (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-21 10:16

The popularity of beef can be witnessed at Yoshinoya, where a simple dish of sliced beef and onions with rice is the choice of many customers. Beef is a regular part of Chinese cuisine. It's considered nutritious and tasty.

Chinese tradition has it that beef boosts your energy, nourishes the blood and strengthens the bones and ligaments. Traditional Chinese medicine also believes it is good for the stomach and spleen.

Almost every Chinese who has eaten beef has probably tried braised beef with brown soy sauce (jiang niu rou). The meat is seasoned, left to simmer for some time and then sliced to serve as a cold appetizer. Beef is also used in the nationally popular hot pot.

Equally famous is beef noodles (niu rou mian), the secret of which lies in tasty beef slices or chops, and a beef broth made through a long simmer for extra flavor.

A Chinese-style stewed beef with potatoes became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, when former Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev described his ideal communist food as beef goulash, the national dish of Hungary.

Almost all major Chinese cuisines have their famous beef dishes, of which Sichuan cuisine's dry-fried beef strips with chili is one of the hottest and boiled beef slices in spicy soup one of the most popular.

Beef is also cooked a lot in Cantonese cuisine and one of the healthiest and tastiest dishes is braised beef belly (niu nan) with white turnips. In the comedy God of Cookery, Hong Kong movie star Steven Chow plays a chef who becomes a sensation after inventing a dish of Cantonese hand-made beef balls.

In Jiangsu and Zhejiang cuisine, a popular choice is fried beef strips with Hangzhou-style green chili, in which both the beef and chili are really tender. Braised beef chops (pa niu rou) and brown braised beef with soy sauce are both iconic dishes in Shandong.

Dried beef or dried yak is also one of Chinese people's favorite snacks, available in most supermarkets and Tibetan restaurants.

It isn't only the meat that is popular. The Chinese are increasingly finding milk, cheese and yogurt to be a great source of calcium and protein. Much of this dairy food is imported but Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Yunnan make their own butter tea, milk tea and cheeses.