This Versatile Braised Meat Is One of China’s Most Famous Muslim Foods

China, where pork is king, is not usually known for beef, yet there is one beef dish that is practically ubiquitous, found everywhere from  Nanjing to Beijing, on fine restaurant menus and wet market steam tables. This dish is five-spice beef (wǔxiāng niúròu, 五香牛肉), sometimes also simply called braised beef (jiàng niúròu, 酱牛肉). It’s a pretty simple dish: just a hunk of beef—usually the tough but rewarding shank—that is slowly braised in a melange of spices and sauces until it is deeply flavored and toothsome. 

I think the reason five-spice beef is so immensely popular is that it’s such a  versatile dish. Cooks all across the country have adapted it to suit their own palates: In Sichuan, people may throw a handful of dried chilies in the braising liquid, or perhaps add some doubanjiang. In the South, there are variations that include fermented tofu and/or dried tangerine peel. 

This versatility also extends to how it’s served: In Shanghainese restaurants, you’ll find five-spiced beef sliced and served simply, as part of a cold appetizer (凉菜) suite that might also include smoked fish and drunken chicken. In Dongbei restaurants, you’ll see it stuffed inside shao bing or dressed with punchy black vinegar and garlic as a salad. And at humble noodle stands across the country, you can find it used as a topping for soup noodles (as in the photo above).

Growing up, I associated five-spice beef with my grandmother, who hardly cooked but had this one ace up her sleeve. She was from Changzhou, so I always thought this was a Jiangnan dish. It wasn’t until I landed in cooking school that I questioned this assumption.

Clues on the Origins of Five Spice Beef

Like mutton, beef is deeply associated with halal culture in China. In the wet markets, it’s typical to see a whole aisle of pig butchers and one lonely beef stall run by a member of the Hui minority (the most populous Muslim ethnic group in China). If you’ve ever wondered why pork and beef dumplings are hardly ever found on the same menu, it’s due to this religious and cultural divide. (The Hui also operate dumpling shops and other restaurants that serve only beef-based dishes.) 

To be clear, it’s not that only Hui Muslims can work with beef, it’s that beef is very expensive in China compared to pork. Domestic production is limited due to the country’s dearth of grazing lands, so, to meet skyrocketing demand, China has become the largest importer of beef in the world. The Hui people, who descend from Silk Road migrants and are widely dispersed across China, had long established their own local and small-scale beef supply chains to meet their dietary needs and, eventually, to cater to the changing tastes of their Han neighbors. (Economists call this, inelegantly, the “household slaughter sector.”)

I suspected that five-spice beef had Hui roots, but my attempts to validate this hunch led me into familiar terrain: boastfully specific yet completely unprovable Chinese food lore. In this case, the dish’s origin story is that there once was a man named Ma Qingrui, who lived in the 1700s, during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. He was a Hui Muslim (Ma is a common Hui last name derived from Muhammad), and he worked in the imperial kitchens. He was good at his job, so he would be rewarded from time to time with sides of mutton, which he would then sell on the streets. Eventually, he quit his day job to sell mutton. In 1775, he opened a restaurant called Yue Sheng Zhai (月盛斋) that sold spiced braised mutton. The restaurant was a wild success, and Yue Sheng Zhai mutton became a foodie status item among the Beijing elite; Empress Dowager Cixi is said to have been extra fond of it. 

With all due respect to this great story, let’s be real: Ma Qingrui probably did not invent spiced, braised mutton. In all likelihood, it’s a dish that has existed in some form amongst Muslim peoples for thousands of years. But I like this story, because not only is Yue Sheng Zhai still around (operated by 7th-generation Ma’s), but it is also one of the largest Muslim corporations in China and the only state-controlled producer of halal meat. Though the recipe may have started with mutton, a beef version of this dish quickly overtook the original’s popularity, likely because beef is less gamy and, thus, better suited to the palates of other Chinese diners. 

There is one thing that Yue Sheng Zhai did indisputably invent while building this empire: a patented process for producing cooked, shelf-stable five-spice beef. (My favorite part of the patent is that they use “Western injection technology” to marinate the meat.) A while back, I managed to find someone selling Yue Sheng Zhai Shelf Stable Five Spice Beef on Ebay (though imported beef products like this are actually illegal; the link has since been taken down). Not being able to visit the original Yue Sheng Zhai restaurant in Beijing, I did exactly that. At nearly $40 for 2 bags, each containing 200g of beef, it ranks among the most expensive beef I’ve ever purchased. So how did it stack up? 

The meat’s texture, wondrously (or creepily, depending on your stance) was supple and moist, almost exactly like my home-cooked versions. The flavor was balanced and penetrated deep into the meat (Western injection technology at work!), though it favored the Northerner’s salty palate; I would have preferred a touch more sugar. However, the overall impression was muted, the complex spices and sauces a whisper rather than a flex. The deadened flavor was not helped by the complete lack of sauce—in my opinion one of the best parts of five-spice beef. (Now that I’ve done the work of taste testing for you, I hope you’ll rest easy in not personally tasting the illegal Yue Sheng Zhai Shelf Stable Five Spice Beef. Make your own and save your big bucks for a cut of wagyu.)

Ingredients and Substitutions

The basic steps for making five-spice beef are the same as those for making its predecessor, braised mutton: Marinate the meat, blanch the meat, braise the meat with sauces and spices. Beef shank, which is available at Chinese markets and some butcher counters, is the most popular cut for this dish, and my favorite, because it’s relatively inexpensive and you get lovely ripplings of tendon in each slice. Alternatively, you could take a page from Yue Sheng Zhai and try this recipe with mutton, beef ribs or beef tongue (all variations served at the restaurant). 

When it comes to spices, I like to stay close to the dish’s Northern Chinese Muslim roots, so that’s the interpretation you’ll find here. The old hands at Lao Fan Gu claim that the imperial version of five-spice beef—the version the palace chefs would have made for Qianlong and Cixi—had a number of Chinese medicinal ingredients. They probably did this to be fancy and because beef is considered nutritious and beneficial to health in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Lao Fan Gu specifies nine spices, each san qian (三钱), or “three cash,” in quantity. (A cash is an imperial unit of weight, only used today in some Chinese herb shops, that is roughly three grams.) The spices are:

• star anise (bājiǎo, 八角 or dà liào, 大料)
• Angelica dahurica (bái zhǐ, 白芷)
• clove (dīng xiāng, 丁香)
• fennel seed (xiǎo huí xiāng, 小茴香)
• cassia bark (guì pí, 桂皮)
• Kaempferia galanga, or sand ginger (shānnài or san’na, 山奈 or shā jiāng, 沙薑))
• Wurfbainia vera, or white cardamom (bái dòu kòu, 白豆蔻 or bái kòu, 白蔻)
• Sichuan pepper (huā jiāo, 花椒)
• Wurfbainia villosum / Amomum villosum or black cardamom (cǎo guǒ, 草果 or shā rén, 砂仁)

I tested these spices in these quantities, and I can tell you without hesitation that three grams of clove will always be too much clove. After decreasing the amount, I tested this spice blend again, this time comparing it to a regular five-spice version using only star anise, clove, fennel, cassia and Sichuan pepper. The nine-spice version had a sweeter, rounder impression and a medicinal aftertaste, and I did not think it was significantly better. So unless you already have these additional ingredients on hand, I advise sticking to my recipe as written, using just the five classic spices. (The Mala Market sells most of these nine spices. Alternatively, their readymade five spice is perfect for this, as it comes with whole spices in the exact proportions used in the recipe. Rather than buying each item separately, you can use a small portion of each from the mixture.) 

Finally, my recipe calls for Northern Chinese fermented soybean paste (huángdòu jiàng, 黄豆酱). If you’ve never encountered it before, imagine a non-spicy Pixian doubanjiang. It is deeply savory, like soy sauce, and also slightly sweet. Though they are not the same, Japanese miso or Korean doenjiang are acceptable substitutes in this recipe, since we just need the paste to help add salt, umami and depth of flavor to an already complex mixture. Pixian doubanjiang is also OK to use if you don’t mind also adding a little chili pepper, as is fermented tofu. My grandmother’s recipe does not call for a fermented bean product, but with apologies to 婆婆, my seasoned adult tastebuds find it a bit lacking.

The rest is up to you. If you want your beef to have a kick, go ahead and use chilies (dried or fresh, not fermented/pickled). If you prefer a Shanghainese level of sweetness, increase the amount of rock sugar or add dried hawthorns. Play with the template, and maybe someday you can even patent a new (old) hit yourself. 

For more delicious beef-based dishes, check out Georgia’s Hui-Style Stir-Fried Beef With Pickles (Suancai Chao Niurou; 酸菜炒牛肉) or Xueci’s Chongqing Blanket Noodles With Stewed Beef (Niurou Pugaimian, 牛肉铺盖面) or Sichuan Beef With Tangerine Peel (Chenpi Niurou, 陈皮牛肉).