Hello everyone! Today I’m gonna introduce to you another Chinese dish, fried minced beef with red chili oil and potatoes. It can be quite spicy if you wanna make it so. If you can’t have spicy you can control the amount of red chili oil in it. Why do I call it a Chinese dish? Mainly because we Chinese, unlike people from western world, eat potatoes as a ingredients in a dish instead of main food (such as rice). Haha, joking! It’s because I add quite some spices, which are normally linked with Asia in western people’s eyes. For example, illicium verum, cinnamon, Sichuan pepper and coriander.
Also, here I’d like to present to you almost the most famous chili sauce in China, and you can buy it in basically every Chinese supermarkets abroad. It seems when I was cooking I added a lot, but it’s really just one table spoon and it’s not that spicy.
Lao Gan Ma (Chinese: 老干妈) or Old Godmother is a brand of chili sauces that are made in China. The sauce is produced by Laoganma Special Flavour Foodstuffs Company, which was established in 1997. Development of the sauce began in August 1996 by Tao Huabi (陶华碧), who employed 40 people at that time in a workshop environment. 1.3 million bottles of the sauce are produced daily. The product is sold in China and in over 30 countries. Tao Huabi is the owner of the company, and her son Li Guishan became the first president of the company. Women of China magazine reported in January 2011 that the company’s assets were 1.3 billion yuan (US $190 million) and that the company had 2,000 employees at that time.
Ok, now let’s start preparing the ingredients.
Ingredients
- Potato (500g)
- Minced beef (550-600g)
- Sunflower oil (35g) (15g for marinating, 20g for frying)
- Cooking wine (20-25g)
- Zhenjiang aromatic vinegar (5g)
- Lao Gan Ma chili oil (one table spoon or depending on how spicy you want it to be)
- Garlic (3-5 cloves) (minced)
- Bell pepper powder (with or without)
- Black pepper
- Salt (5g) (3g for marinating and 2g for frying)
- Coriander
Procedures
- First of all, we need to marinate the minced beef. Put 15g sunflower oil, all cooking wine, all aromatic vinegar, 1/3 of garlic, bell pepper powder, black pepper and 3g salt in and mix everything well. Put the whole bowl into fridge for 30 mins.
- At the same time you can cut the potatoes into small pieces.
- After 30 mins, put the rest of sunflower oil, 1/3 garlic and chili oil in a pan and heat it up (5/6 fire) till the mixture starts sizzling.
- Put the potatoes in and fry them till you see almost each piece of potato has oil on.
- Fry them for some time till the potatoes turn golden yellow.
- At this point, put the marinated minced beef in and fry all the things till the water comes out.
- Don’t worry if there’s too much water, it’s because of the cooking wine and the beef itself. Just keep frying till there’s no red beef left.
- Add cinnamon, illicium verum, Sichuan pepper (better powder, otherwise big pieces will make your tongue numb) and 300 ml water.
- Change fire to 2/6, add a cover and let it boil for 8-10 mins. If by the end you feel there’s too much water left you can change the fire to 5/6 again and let the water evaporate for 2-5 mins.
At last, add some coriander pieces and the rest of the garlic and mix them well with the rest of the food. I usually eat it with rice and as for how you wanna have it, it totally depends on you. Maybe some bread is also a good choice? Bon Appetite!
