A Simple Beef Stir-Fry From Yunnan

The foods of Yunnan Province vary wildly from place to place. In the north you’ll find Tibetan specialties like momos and butter tea, while in the south there’s green papaya salad and fried river weed crackers. But everywhere you go, there’s one cuisine you’ll find in pretty much every region: the beef-centric dishes of the Hui, a Muslim minority that has lived all across the province ever since the group first came to Yunnan with Kublai Khan’s army in the 13th century. 

While most Yunnan restaurants serve a lot of pork and fish and chicken, Hui restaurants are usually known for their beef dishes. These can range from stews filled with black cardamom and vegetables to noodle soups to deep-fried strips of beef with chilies. But my favorite Hui dish is also one of the simplest I’ve ever had: stir-fried beef with pickles (suāncài chǎo niúròu; 酸菜炒牛肉). This is the dish I turn to when I need something fast and delicious to feed my family, and everyone loves it so much that it’s rarely out of our cooking rotation for more than a couple weeks. It’s also one of the first things I learned to make when I moved to Yunnan and started traveling around the province: 

My first trip into Yunnan’s countryside—and off the usual Kunming-Dali-Lijiang tourist track—was extremely memorable. I was heading to the Shaxi valley, a couple hours northwest of Dali, to meet up with a friend for a few days of quiet in an area she told me was possibly the prettiest spot in all of China and still mostly unknown to outsiders. (“You should go soon,” she said. “They just got their first bar; who knows what it will be like in a couple of years.”) 

This was a decade before the high-speed train linking Kunming to Dali made the trip short and convenient, and, to make matters worse, what should have been an 8-hour bus trip turned into an epic 13-hour journey that involved a series of breakdowns and roadside repairs, a switch to a packed mianbaochi van, and a woman carrying a chicken in a cardboard box—and feeding it by scattering grains on the brim of her ornate beribboned hat. So, by the time I finally reached the town of Sideng, the valley’s commercial center, everything was closed and dark. (Thankfully the owner of the Old Theater Inn, a couple villages over, was still awake and happy to come collect me.)

The next morning, I set off to walk back to Sideng, to see what the town was like in daylight. The path through nearby fields and tiny farming villages was beautiful but also a lot longer than I’d anticipated, and by the time I reached town I was starving. In those days Sideng didn’t have much tourism infrastructure, just a beautiful, quiet square with an old theater and a temple; a couple backpacker-style coffee shops (both closed that day); and a few vendors selling scarves, hats and other things the occasional Chinese tourist might want. But as I walked up the curving main street, I saw an eatery in an open concrete room a few steps below street level. The sign painted on the wall said 龙凤餐馆, Dragon Phoenix Restaurant, and the low tables and stools inside were packed with customers. 

I ordered lunch by pointing to a couple of dishes that looked good on other people’s tables, then watched the proprietor (a woman in her 40s) cook my meal in a little alcove on a wok stove powered by cakes of pressed carbon and coal dust. Both dishes—this stir-fried beef with pickles and garlic chives and a plate of stir-fried lotus root—were flavored with homemade suancai, a local style of pickle made from mustard greens, and both were so delicious that I went back the next day and ordered them again.

Yunnan-Style Pickles

Yunnan Province is home to countless kinds of pickles. Everything from fresh chilies to garlic to tiny chive flowers to fruit is preserved through the simple magic of salt-based anaerobic fermentation. But the most common kind of pickle (in the central part of the province, at least) is suancai (酸菜), a flavorful, dark green version made of mustard greens. 

The recipe for suancai is quite simple: all you really need is salt and Chinese mustard greens (the kind that have wide flat leaves and curving thick stems with ridges on them, not the frilly Western greens that look something like radish leaves). But most recipes include dried chili flakes as well (you can use as much or as little as you like) and some Sichuan peppercorns.

Whatever you chose to put into them, the steps are easy as can be:

• Chop the clean greens and put them into a big bowl.
• Add plenty of salt (and the chilies and/or huajiao) and massage everything together really well—until the greens have wilted and released a lot of liquid.
• Put the greens and their liquid into a classic Chinese-style pickle jar, with a water seal, and let them ferment in a dark place.
• The greens will start to sour after about a week but you can keep fermenting them longer, if you like, for a stronger flavor. (I store them in the refrigerator when they’re done, to stop the fermentation; a big batch made in winter will be good all year long and will continue to pickle slowly as they sit.)

Some cooks in Yunnan dry out their greens by laying them in the sun before pickling them; you could do the same thing in a low oven, if you like. The version I learned to make, however, uses fresh greens that release lots of liquid—which I find helps with the pickling process.

Mimicking Chinese-Style Beef Dishes at Home

The beef served in Hui restaurants is usually dry-aged—at Dragon Phoenix Restaurant, there are big pieces of meat hanging along the walls (a common sight at many beef restaurants). As a result, the beef we get in markets in the West is far less flavorful than what you’d get at a Hui eatery. 

To get a similarly rich flavor in your stir-fried beef with pickles, you’ll need to give the meat a bump of added umami by drizzling in some soy sauce as you cook. You should also start with free-range, grass-fed beef if you can get it, as it’s already far more flavorful than conventional meat.

You’ll also want to get a good sear on the meat, to get all the nuanced, complex flavors that come from the maillard reaction (the chemical reaction that happens when the sugars and amino acids in your food are transformed by heat). This happens easily in traditional wok cooking—the high heat of a wok stove browns meat quickly and easily—but if you have a Western stove (even the kind with a “high” burner), you’ll need to be more intentional to get that good sear: Once your meat is no longer raw and pink, just press it up against the sides of the wok a few times and let it sit there, undisturbed, for 30 seconds or so. This will give it time to brown nicely, even with the somewhat lower heat. (It will also give any liquid the meat has released into the bottom of the wok a chance to boil away.)

For more delicious dishes from Yunnan, check out Michelle Zhao’s Yunnan Small Pot Rice Noodles (which also use suancai) and Crunchy Lotus Root Salad.