Sichuan’s Perpetual Lushui Stock

Since COVID, some of my friends learned to keep perpetual sourdough starters. I learned to keep this perpetual Chinese master stock (卤水, lǔshuǐ/lou⁵seoi²). The idea is simple: Use the same stock for poaching and braising your meats every time, replenishing aromatics and seasoning as needed. The stock concentrates over time with all the flavors that have ever paid a visit. The meats take on the complex flavor of the stock, without you having to recreate that seasoning from scratch every time. And eventually, the whole becomes greater than any of the parts.

Perpetual anything is more relationship than possession. If you take care of your stock (or starter), it will provide for and take care of you. For life.

While the English title “master stock” is entirely creative (卤水 just means brine), the description captures its range of use. This brine can be used as a stock to cook almost anything you wish. In China, entire shops make their name just selling lushui brined meats/veggies (collectively called 卤味, lǔwèi). You can also use your lushui as the concentrated flavor base for things like claypot rice or the sesame sauce for 热干面 (règānmiàn), Wuhan’s famous “hot dry noodles.” Somewhere down the line, it was also called a “master sauce”—likely due to its full title 卤水汁 (lǔshuǐzhī), brine sauce/marinade.

There are even more dialectical transliterations (our friends at Chinese Cooking Demystified call it “lo sui”). Whether you know it by one of these names or others, it’s worth learning this extremely practical tradition.

The Key to Crafting Good Stock

While most Chinese master stock recipes are for soy sauce brines, Sichuan lushui is unique in that it forgoes soy flavoring. Brined meats can always be tossed later in chili oil dressings and heavier, darker sauces, and they often accompany stronger flavored foods on the table. But another reason is that over time, soy sauce can sour and turn bitter. For Sichuan cooks, who favor fragrance and freshness, great lushui stock depends on the right balance of aromatics, umami and color.

• Aromatics. You can use five or fifty kinds of spices, each with their own use. This is fairly up to interpretation, although the classic, tried-and-true braising spices in The Mala Market‘s Chinese 5 Spice are nonnegotiable. I left out hard-to-find spices not well known to Western cooks, let alone Western botanists: (砂仁 (shārén), 白蔻 (báikòu), 草蔻 (cǎokòu), 栀子 (zhīzi), 当归 (dāngguī), etc). Fresh mature ginger and scallion are used in part because they’re delicious, but most importantly because of their ability to neutralize unpleasant odors in the form of volatile compounds. Spices like Sichuan pepper, coriander, cloves, star anise, cassia bark, sand ginger, black cardamom etc. have a similar effect. Rice wine for cooking also helps deodorize odors by evaporating them. Lushui features all of the above.
  • Bloom the dry spices with a splash of high-proof baijiu (above 52%) or gin/vodka and let soak before adding to the stock. It helps bring out the aromas. For convenience, if you’re making a particularly large batch of lushui, you can briefly bloom the spices with heat in a wok or skillet.
  • To keep the flavor (and effect) consistent, here’s a pro trick: Keep the same spice bundle for the first five brines. On the third brine, add a new bag (I used a tea infuser) without removing the first one, so there is simultaneously one fresh and one old bag. On the fifth brine, remove the old bag and continue cycling fresh spices.

• Umami. Use whole 老母鸡 (lǎomǔjī), pastured old hen sold as “stewing hen” in the U.S., for your chicken stock base. If you can’t find an old hen, use the best whole organic pastured chicken you can afford with extra parts for more flavor (see bullet below). You want that good oil, the kind that comes from a healthy chicken’s yellow fat. One of the defining qualities of a good lushui is that it MUST have a thick layer of oil on the surface—as much as 2 centimeters in restaurants. In China, you can actually find 卤油 (lǔyóu) sold on its own, by people with too much of the oil, for people with not enough oil. At home, you don’t need a specific amount of oil for this brine to “work”—just don’t throw away what you do have.
  • Chicken fat = oil = flavor. Many spices are oil-soluble, not water-soluble. If you remove the oil, there will not be an effective vessel for the fragrance. Good lushui depends on its oil content.
  • The best chicken stock comes from quality whole chicken. However, if supermarket parts are most accessible to you, combine organic chicken wings, breasts and drumsticks (all bone-in, skin-on). Any of these are also recommended to supplement a whole young (not stewing) chicken. You can further make up for not using a whole hen by sourcing diverse parts from a good butcher or international market. There, you can find collagen- and flavor-filled connective pieces with lots of cartilage: chicken feet are most affordable. Other good parts include chicken necks, chicken carcasses (fresh), pork trotters and pork backbone.

• Color. The main source of color in Sichuan lushui comes from molten rock sugar. The sugar, once melted, turns into dark, amber caramel. Cooked separately and then poured into the stockpot moments before burning and turning bitter, the caramel turns the stock into liquid gold. Such deep, golden-brown broth is so prized, many chefs also use zhizi dried gardenia fruit to naturally amplify the yellow coloring.

Traditional Mèn Soaking Technique

Leveraging one key practice will make you the master of this Chinese master stock. There is a Chinese brining technique for maximum flavor and tenderness summed up as “三分靠卤,七分靠焖 (sānfēn kào lǔ, qīfēn kào mèn).” This roughly translates to the cooking depending on 30% active brining time (lu) and 70% carryover cooking (men) that occurs while the meat is soaking in the pot, covered, with the fire off.

For tough cuts of meat with dense muscle and lots of connective tissue that needs time to melt down, this is especially important. The gentle soaking ensures the meat does not dry out from boiling before the collagen breaks down. It also ensures that everything you brine gets more time to soak up the lushui flavor, just like for chayedan tea eggs. When in doubt for larger cuts, longer soaking is best.

Many lushui recipes on the English-speaking Internet lead you to blanch the meat (and flavor) first. Instead, I encourage you to cold-soak your meats before cooking to draw out blood water, then cook the meat directly in the brine, skimming the scum as it arises. This makes sure all the good flavor from the meat gets into the brine—it is your master stock, after all—and keeps the cooking process simpler.

Approximate Cooking Times for Different Meats

Item	Active Brining Time (卤, lǔ)	Soaking Time (焖, mèn)
Chicken drumstick	30 minutes	60 minutes
Chicken wing	10	30
Chicken feet	10	20
Chicken gizzard	20	30
Chicken heart	10	30
Whole young chicken	60-90 (longer for local/free-range)	60
Duck leg	20	60
Duck gizzard	30	60
Duck heart	10	60
Whole rabbit	30	60
Pig ear	30	60-120
Pork belly	40	120
Pork ribs	60	60
Pork trotter	30	60
Pork hock	40	90
Beef shank	60	120 + chill in fridge overnight
Beef tendon	90	120
Tripe	120	30

How to Store Lushui Brine

After every use, the most important steps are to 1) skim/strain any leftover cooking debris and 2) return the pot to a boil for a couple minutes, lid on or off depending on below:

If storing brine on the counter (in the pot), for use within 2 days, return pot to boiling, cover, boil two minutes with the lid on and do not open the lid again after. Let cool on its own.

If storing brine in the fridge for use within 3-5 days, do not cover the pot (or jar) until it has cooled completely! The condensed steam that collects under the lid will drip back above the solidified fat layer that seals the broth, making it likely to spoil. Transfer to sterilized jars after boiling and let cool before covering.

At this point, you can also freeze the stock for infrequent use. For freezing, trapped steam is less of a problem but I’ve found it does contribute to iciness. To use, thaw in fridge overnight.

For more traditional Sichuan standby recipes, see Ma’s Clarified Old Hen Soup (Dunjitang, 炖鸡汤), the original Sichuan Chili Oil Recipe ft. Caiziyou (Lajiaoyou, 辣椒油), and Taylor’s Sichuan Naturally Fermented Pickles (Paocai, 泡菜).