Get ready to serve! Serving Your Beijing Ground Beef
Stir everything together and you’re finished. Once the sauce leaves a trail behind a spatula, you can remove from the heat and add the bell pepper and onion back to the skillet. It shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes or so. If your Beijing beef sauce is taking longer than expected to reduce, turn up the heat a bit. You’ll need to reduce the sauce before adding the veggies back to the skillet. Adding the Beijing Sauce and Cooked Veggies After you have some browning on the beef, break it up with a spatula and fully cook before adding the sauce. You want to get some browning on the beef via the Maillard reaction, so I like to press the ground beef flat to create more surface area. Once you’ve cooked the veggies and transferred them from the pan, add the ground beef to the same pan. So you don’t want to soften them too much. The veggies in the original Beijing Beef from Panda Express have some bite to them. You want the bell pepper to slightly soften and the onion to pick up a tiny bit of color around the edges. For this Beijing beef, I used the same Austin-based Kettle & Fire that I used in my chicken birria recipe.įinal note: If you have all the sauce ingredients, you have pretty much everything to make other one-pan favorites in my Thai basil ground chicken and five spice ground beef and eggs. You can use any beef broth, but using a high quality bone broth makes the dish noticeably richer. While hoisin is sweeter, if you have some gochujang around from my spicy ground beef and quinoa bowls, that would still give you some fermented soy bean flavor and a bit of sweetness. It might look like a lot of sauces, but the good news is that you can probably substitute if you’re short on one or two ingredients. Here’s everything you’ll need for a Beijing beef sauce copycat: You’ll obviously need a pound of lean ground beef in addition to a small yellow onion, red bell pepper, and a tablespoon of olive oil. If you’d like to get straight to cooking, you can skip down to the recipe card at the bottom of the post. I’ve included a visual recipe walkthrough below with ingredient substitution notes, cooking tips, and serving ideas.
Instead, you can have this dish on the table in about 30 minutes with only one pan to clean. Using ground beef also means you won’t need to marinate, coat, and fry the beef. A 7 oz serving of my Beijing ground beef, on the other hand, has 250 calories, 23g of protein, 18g of carbs, and just 8g of fat. My take aims to lighten up the sauce and swap the fried beef for lean ground beef.įor a quick nutrition facts comparison, a 5.6 oz serving of the original Beijing beef has 470 calories, 13g of protein, 46g of carbs, and 26g of fat. It also has the consistency of a fried flank steak but tender when chewed.In case you’re unfamiliar with the original Beijing beef from Panda Express, it’s an Americanized Chinese dish consisting of fried beef strips, bell peppers, onion, and a sweet and tangy sauce. The texture is unique compared to the other Chinese beef dishes that I had, so far. Since the flavor is so rich, it is advisable to balance it by having some sides (such as rice or noodles) while munching. After the first bite, the tangy taste immediately permeates in your mouth leaving you speechless – looking forward to the next bite. You’ll understand what I’m trying to say once you try one. I am a fan of sweet and sour pork and this dish is pretty much similar – that is if you raise it to the next level. The flavor is probably the main reason why I like it. There isn’t really anything extra-ordinary about the Beijing Beef – but I still like to have it once in a while. As for the Chow Mein, the closest recipe that we have is the Pancit Canton– which I think is a better alternative. However, you might want to check our Orange Chicken recipe post if you want to know more about it. Let’s not talk about Orange chicken and Chow Mein for now because my attention is focused solely on Beijing Beef.