cantonese steamed beef meatballs 鮮竹牛肉丸 - part 3

鮮竹牛肉丸, 即製即吃. One of the reason that I diligently blog about my culinary journey is I would look back in later days and review my own progress as well as the evolution of taste and interest. I take abundance of photos as they are better than thousand words.


The last time I made cantonese steamed beef meatballs 鮮竹牛肉丸 was in early December last year. This is one of my dim sum favorite. Its Chinese name is rather odd as it 鮮竹牛肉 means fresh bamboo beef meat balls, yet there is no bamboo to be found anywhere. It turns out the fresh bamboo is referring to the soy milk skin that is used to line the meat balls. The soy milk skin is called 豆皮 which means soy bean skin which is equally misleading. This is because in Chinese often the descriptive name is shorten.

豆皮 actually means tofu skin, which is made from soy milk. The tofu skin is actually also misleading as it is not the skin of the tofu, but rather a byproduct of boiling soy milk which is used to make tofu. So what about 鮮竹 (fresh bamboo)?

Well soy milk skin (tofu skin) can be made into many different forms. The most common are in flat sheets, and squeezed into a thin bundle to form pieces of dried soy milk skin sticks. As the sticks resembles a stalk of bamboo it is called tofu stick or tofu bamboo stick 豆竹. The problem is with this dimsum dish you never use the stick forms of the soy milk skin. But this is how often Cantonese like to name dishes. Dish are often name for the most novel or fancy connotation rather than in a straight forward way that describes the main ingredients.

I bought this smallest package of lean ground beef from Costco. I use it for many different recipes. For this batch of cantonese steamed beef meatballs 鮮竹牛肉丸 I used about 2 lb 7 oz which resulted in a big batch.

I pulled some spring onions from my yard

these are aged tangerine peels - a necessary ingredient for these meatballs

I briefly soak them in hot water and drained

the tangerine peels water is used to marinate the ground beef

the peels are dice up into tiny bits

it would turned out that I later added a lot more after tested the first test meatball

pork fat is needed also

I hand diced the pork fat

I chopped up some Chinese celery as they goes well with the cilantro, which is a necessary ingredient for these meatballs also

chopped spring onions

these gingers are to be grated in a food processor

as fresh water chestnuts are difficult to find I substituted with apple like I did before instead; they adds some subtle sweetness and crunch

all the ingredients added and mixed

and worked by using this wheat hook

It turned out using the mixer to work the meat paste wasn't enough to get it to a gluey consistency. I work the mixture further with my hand and throw it hard into a stainless steel bowl countless times. This is the technique for making the meat paste that will bind well.

a small test meatball

soy milk skin lines the plate

 these babies are ready to be steamed; each batch takes about 12 minutes

what is interesting is after coming off the bamboo steamer you want to give the meatballs some time to rest and for the excess moisture to evaporate; the pale ones right after coming out of steamer (left) and after resting for a few minutes (right)

I had these meatballs for dinner and breakfast. There are so much that I ended up making them and vacuum packed a bunch to store in the freezer.