minced beef fried rice 生炒牛肉飯

This is a very common and popular dish in a restaurant that serves Cantonese cuisine in Hong Kong. In the old days in these restaurant there is only a few dishes of fried rice. This minced beef fried rice 生炒牛肉飯 and Yangzhou fried rice 楊州炒飯 are always on the menu.


Yangzhou fried rice 楊州炒飯

All these restaurant has a lunch menu in which most dishes fits the lunch budget. Most people would order a dish like this as a one-dish meal for individual serving.

I didn't plan to make this dish. As with most of my cooking I give very little planning and most often I conceived of the dish the last minute based on the ingredients I have on hand. For this dish it all started with 6 oz of marinated beef I have in the refrigerator. I had been watching movies back to back on Netflix and I just want to whip up something quick and easy. Why not make minced beef fried rice 生炒牛肉飯? I have not make this dish for a very long time.

In Chinese culinary art most dishes are given a well thought out name to entice your interest and appetite and this dish is no exception. Unfortunately without the proper cultural background a translation is - well lost in translation. 生炒牛肉飯 translates as minced beef fried rice start with stir-frying the minced beef from raw.

For anyone who know how to make good Cantonese style fried rice the transitional wisdom is always to use left over cooked rice. Using left over rice give you the loose grains of rice you want in these dishes.

I have no left over cooked rice so I have to cook up some rice before I can make this dish. Nothing is easier with a rice cooker. I used very high quality Thai Jasmine rice for all my Chinese cooking. Thai Jasmine rice is a long grain rice and is very aromatic that it is also called frangrant rice. When properly cooked it is nutty, somewhat chewy and toothsome. For some including myself one can eat a bowl of good plain rice by itself. I like to select the "quick" mode in my automatic rice cooking so the rice stay very al dante.

The reason behind the traditional wisdom of using left over cook rice is to avoid too much moisture as well as wanting the loose grains of rice in the resultant dish. I can achieve these objective with freshly made "steamed" rice. Here is how to prepare freshly cooked rice for this dish.

1) A few minutes before the rice is cook, loosen the rice with the rice dispenser. I do this regardless whenever I make "steamed" rice.
2) Instead of keeping the cooked rice covered with the lid after cooking, I open the lid and let the steam escape. Because the rice is piping hot the grains loss a lot of water content very quickly.

a few minutes later the rice is perfect to make this dish - you can see the loose grains

I tweaked the ingredients slightly by adding a slight amount of chopped onion. Otherwise it is true to the old-world Cantonese recipe. Although the beef is translated as minced beef I prefer to chop them up with a knife. For expedience sake I compromised and use a food processor. I don't like to use food processor as much as the same reason I don't use a blade type coffee grinder. It is not because of the trouble of hand chopping the beef but rather I don't want to ruin my good end grain maple cutting board. I am still on the hunt for a semi-decent but cheap Asian end grain cutting board for the sole purpose of chopping.

ingredients: egg, diced scallion, green peas (not pictured), minced beef (never use store bought hamberger meat), chopped onion, and seasoning

As the name 生炒牛肉飯 suggested the beef is stir-fried from raw. I stared with the beef and the chopped onion first. Once the beef is semi-cooked I pour in the scrambled raw egg. The common mistake is to wait too long to pour in the rice after the egg. You want to pour in the rice immediately so the egg can coat the rice and distribute widely across the rice grains. This is what give the Cantonese fried rice the nutty taste.

For this dish I fired up my commercial gas burner outdoors. The burner, at full output, has 120,000 BTU! While one can cook this dish with lower power burner a high output burner give a better result. I actually keep the burner at a fraction of the maximum output.

One of the most important attributes of a good fried rice are it should be more than what meets the senses. It should be fluffy. The rice shout taste nutty and light and not being oily. With so few ingredients good ingredients count. I was very surprised with how good the dish turned out using fresh rice. It actually tasted much better than using left over rice because there is no lost of the delicate aroma and sweet and nutty taste of the excellent Thai Jasmine rice.

you can see the seared outside of the minced beef and the loose grains of rice; there is generous amount of beef also

it was a big serving for more than a meal; here is what i saved for a dinner with stir fried sea prawns and celery 西芹炒虾球

Stir fried sea prawns and celery 西芹炒虾球 is just a dish similar to stir fry of grouper and celery 斑片炒西芹.

I came across wild sea prawns at Winco Foods at great price because some prawns are broken (not whole) from handling. I snapped up 6 lbs at 60% of the normal price.

closeup of stir fried sea prawns and celery 西芹炒虾球 - there are shitake mushrooms and black fungus in there too