chiuchow braised beef soup noodle with innards 潮州牛什麵

Braised beef soup noodles are found in many Asian cultures. The diversity is countless. The one that is my favorite is Chiuchow 潮州 style. It may just be it left the deepest impression being something that attracted my curiosity when I was very young growing up in Hong Kong 香港.


When I was in grade school I walked a few miles to and from school on Canton Road from our home in Tsim Sha Tsiu 尖沙嘴. Those were the simpler days and kids play relatively safely on the streets. It would be years later before our family has a television. Life was seldom dull however as there are many things to see on the way to and from school. At the intersection of Haithong Road 海防道 and Canton Road 廣東道 there are a cluster of Dai Pai Dongs. I often would stop and watch the proprietors preparing food in the early afternoon. I would be years before I knew these are Chiuchow 潮州 people.

There were a few things they do always fascinated me. One was making fish balls 魚蛋 and beef meat balls 牛丸. In those days they did everything by hand including the beating of the fish and meat into a sticky and stiff paste. The other is how they laboriously clean the cow offal. This included tripe , lung, spleen, and intestines. For cleaning tripe they would lay it out on a wooden table and scrape off the black membrane with a Chinese chief knife. It was very labor intensive task (yes, I just found out first hand with the green trips that I brought back from a farm here). The intestines was cleaned by washing in a big wooden tub of water. They would turn the intestines inside out to clean them. They would then run water through with a hose to clean the inside properly. That was the ethics of the old timers in the kinder era. I would not trust anyone today to clean the guts of most animals these days.

In my recent trips to Hong Kong I would try to find places that still make Chiuzhou braised beef soup noodles. It becomes harder and harder with each passing years. Many are now closed due to the high rent. In the Central district the one I like is Apricot Garden Chiuchow Noodle and Congee House 桃園潮州粥麵. Unfortunately it was closed up for good when I returned a 4 months ago, most likely due to ever increasing rent.

Apricot Garden Chiuchow Noodle and Congee House in the Central, Hong Kong I found in the staled Google Map street view; it is now a mobile phone shop

here is their entire menu that I brought back many years ago; i was going to throw it away but in the last minute I decided to save an image by scanning it

actually what sorely missing on the menu are cow spleen 牛膀, cow intestines 牛腸, and cow lung 牛肺 (i do not care for it much) - this reflects the timid palate of the soda pop drinking generation

Unlike often in the West most Asian prefers meat from humbler cuts and this including the innards, blood curds, tendons, and fatty meat, or meat around the bones.
only in recent years I can find beef flanks with he membrane not trimmed off here in Portland, Oregon - this is how we like it for making braised beef; actually a lot of people like the fattier cut which is very difficult to find in North America; the piece in front is ox tail

For cow the most coveted meat around the bones is the ox tail. I love ox tail cooked in all manners.
i used to make beef broth from cow shoulder bone but have found the bone often to be not that good as they have been frozen. I recently found beef shanks with bone at Winco supermarket. It is a bit more money than shoulder bone but the shank meat also brings more flavor.

here is an intermediate step of the beef flank after blanching and before braising

 here is another batch with thicker membrane

Learning how to prepare Chiuchow style braised beef is very difficult unless you know some old timer willing to teach you. The people who know are those that sell Chiuchow style beef soup noodles in Hong Kong and they guard the technique like crown jewels. I pretty well figured it out over a long time by trail and error and by taste. I also make inference based on my observations from a lot of them.
i use the red bean curd to braise the meat

 the dried spices i use; the onion is a stand-in for daikon

 i always use daikon whenever possible; i prefer to keep most of the skin for flavor

Here in Portland, Oregon it is impossible to get most of the cow innards except processed tripe. A few days ago I went to a small farm to meet the professional slaughterer of the grass fed cow I committed for 1/4 cow. I brought home the innards I have enough courage and ambition to tackle. Storing them is another issue too even though the butcher would let me take as much as I want from the two cows they slaughtered that day for free. After a lot of hard work I made this beef soup noodle with an assortment of beef innards. It is called 牛什麵 meaning beef soup noodle with an assortment of beef innards in addition to a bit of meat.

I think the reason the Chiuchow style beef soup noodle is so flavorful is because all the ingredients including the innards are braised together in a big pot. For this batch it is my first ever cleaning green tripe, small intestines, and spleen and cook them. I did very well even though I had little idea how long each take to cook and absorb the seasoning and spices 入味. To overcome this I cooked them in stages for their respective time it take to cook but in the same broth 鹵水.

the reward of hours of hard work

closeup of my homemade chiuchow

clockwise from top left - cow small intestine, honeycomb tripe 金錢肚, spleen 牛膀 , rice noodle, shank meat, daikon

tripe was my childhood favorite - here is precious among of honeycomb tripe braised in the Chiuchow 潮州 style

Cows have 4 stomachs. The common tripe is taken from the first two. The most prized is the honeycomb tripe 金錢肚 as in the above photo. It is found only a very small part of the first stomach (may be 20%). Cleaning and cooking cause a lot of shrinkage so a piece of well prepared honeycomb trip is very precious.

About 80% of the first stomach is blanket tripe (it is just flat like a blanket). The second stomach has many compartments and it is where the book tripe 牛百葉 comes from. I wanted to take the second stomach but when I found out the countless compartments full of digesting grass I decided to pass on them. For some reading about tripe please see here.

I spent a good half of a day trimming and cleaning 2 cow's first stomach to prepare them for going into the freezer. And they are still green tripe at this point.

here is what raw cow spleen 牛膀 looks like - i harvest this myself from the pile of cow organs; I hung it for a while to let out some of the blood; I should have cut a few scores on the outer skin to let the blood out

 i blanched them so they are semi-cook so I can subdivide them for used in many batches

these small pieces would then be braised in the rich broth for at least an hour; it would then be sliced into thin pieces as it is quite rich

Something I learnt from processing the spleen 牛膀 myself for the first time is the need to drain out as much blood as possible. Next time I would score the outer skin of the spleen and let as much blood drain out as I can. The cooked spleen 牛膀 does not taste as good with too much blood in it.